Ugh, another hangover. According to Cleveland Clinic, hangovers affect about 75 percent of people who consume copious amounts of alcohol. It doesn’t matter how often you get one; a hangover never feels any better. You’ve tried every home remedy to limited effectiveness. Will IV hydration therapy be the thing that works?
IV hydration therapy can treat many of the symptoms associated with a hangover, including concentration struggles, headaches, light and sound sensitivity, and muscle aches. Once you rehydrate, you’ll begin feeling better.
This guide will delve into hangovers, including why you get them, what works (and what doesn’t), and how to plan IV hydration therapy around your next big night out with your buddies.
What Is a Hangover? What Causes One?
You know hangovers all too well from personal experience, but what exactly is a hangover, and what causes it? Let’s review.
Hangovers 101
A hangover occurs after consuming excessive amounts of alcohol. What an excessive amount is varies for everyone.
You’ll recall the stat from the intro that 75 percent of people experience hangovers after drinking too much. That means another 30+ percent of people don’t get hangovers. However, they’re the exception, not the norm.
A hangover doesn’t happen immediately while enjoying your night out with your friends. It typically hits hours after you call it quits that the onset of symptoms can begin. Sometimes, you don’t even experience symptoms until the next day.
So what symptoms might you experience when hungover? It’s usually a bunch, and they can affect the entire body. Here’s a list:
- Drowsiness
- Moodiness
- Increased heart rate
- Urinating more than usual
- Headache
- Dry mouth
- Bad breath
- Sensitivity to light and/or sound
- Nausea
- Vomiting
- Indigestion
- Diarrhea
- Sweating
- Vertigo
- Thirst
- No appetite
- Lightheadedness
- Exhaustion
- Dizziness
- Dehydration
- Body pain, including muscle aches and a burning feeling in the chest
The severity and duration of the symptoms vary.
What Causes Hangovers?
The cause of a hangover is self-evident: drinking too much alcohol! However, it goes deeper than that.
When you consume alcohol, the body takes the ethanol in that bottle of beer or cocktail and converts it into acetaldehyde using a dehydrogenase enzyme. An aldehyde dehydrogenase enzyme converts the alcohol into acetate.
The acetate becomes water and carbon dioxide, which the body can expel through the liver.
In the meantime, alcohol affects the immune system, altering cytokine concentrations. This can lead to symptoms akin to what a hangover is like, which comes down to the cytokines.
As alcohol begins breaking down, it creates a byproduct called acetaldehyde. The effects of acetaldehyde can also contribute to hangover symptoms but not severity.
You’ll begin urinating more after drinking a lot of alcohol because booze is a diuretic in the same way that coffee is. In other words, you’ll have to urinate more after drinking more.
This doesn’t help dehydration symptoms but isn’t the primary reason you end up dehydrated after a hangover.
Another compound the body makes is congener. In the congener family is methanol, which becomes formic acid and formaldehyde when it breaks down. Congeners affect how severe your hangover will be.
How IV Hydration Therapy Helps with Hangovers
Hair of the dog, apple cider vinegar, green tea: everyone has their go-to hangover cure. The best hangover treatment is time, but rehydrating yourself will go a long way toward making your recovery more manageable.
Specifically, you should try IV hydration therapy. Here’s how hydration therapy can assist with the discomforts of a hangover and accelerate recovery time.
Rehydrates You
Do you know what the symptoms of dehydration are? They’re more than merely feeling dry-mouthed and thirsty. You might also experience tiredness, headache, and dizziness. It sounds like a hangover, right?
Indeed, it could be your dehydration that causes most of your symptoms, not necessarily the hangover.
While a hangover will get better on its own, dehydration doesn’t. If anything, it only worsens, progressing to more severe and potentially life-threatening symptoms if it goes unchecked for too long.
You can spend all day gulping down water to cure your hangover, but as we’ve written about elsewhere on the blog, that’s time-consuming when you’re looking for relief right now. Besides, when drinking water, your body only absorbs so much. With IVs, 100% of the fluids and minerals are absorbed because they go directly into the bloodstream.
Additionally, the last thing you’ll want to do when feeling nauseous is to drink water.
IV hydration therapy will instantly restore your hydration levels. Besides using water in the drip, you’ll also receive electrolytes, a key to rehydrating.
Water alone can’t rehydrate you because it lacks electrolytes, which makes hydration therapy the smarter, more efficient choice.
Manages Headaches
That pounding feeling in your head that’s making your skull feel like it’s about to crack could be compounded by dehydration.
Your brain tissue contracts during bouts of dehydration. The separation between your skull and brain can lead to nerve pain and pressure. If you’re only mildly dehydrated, you can still develop a headache.
Your hangover only compounds your headache, leaving you feeling cotton-headed and unable to function.
IV hydration therapy can restore fluid levels so brain tissue can expand. Further, the drip can send medicine into your veins that work faster than swallowing an over-the-counter NSAID or pain medication.
Might Reduce Light and Sound Sensitivity
Light and sound sensitivity is one of the most unbearable symptoms of a hangover. You can barely open your eyes without feeling blinded by the morning (or afternoon) sun, and the voice of your roommate or partner leaves you reeling.
If your light and sound sensitivity is caused by migraines from a hangover, you can again rely on IV hydration therapy to alleviate all the pain and discomfort. As your migraine graciously disappears, the sensitivity should vanish with it.
Lessons Body Aches
If all you did was sit at a bar drinking last night, why does it feel like you lifted 10,000 pounds or ran a marathon? Your body hurts tremendously.
Body aches as a hangover symptom might not make much sense initially, but there’s a very good reason why you’re in so much pain. Well, make that reason plural.
Alcohol consumption increases inflammation throughout the body. Further, as your body processes alcohol, it can lead to the byproduct of metabolites, which are toxic and make hangover symptoms worse.
Further, you could develop electrolyte imbalances, especially calcium, magnesium, and potassium, which will cause cramps and pain. Dehydration also does your muscles no favors.
IV hydration therapy will renew electrolyte levels, treat inflammation through medications, and renew your hydration levels so your body aches can be a thing of the past!
Helps with Focus
Losing only one to two percent of water in the body can reduce cognitive function, found in a 2014 publication of ACSM’s Health & Fitness Journal. You’ll feel unable to focus on any task.
If you have work the following day after a fun night out, you don’t want to have to call out, but what choice do you have? You can’t concentrate so that you won’t be of much use to your boss or coworkers.
IV hydration therapy can fix you up quickly. The influx of hydration will perk up your mind, renewing your focus so hangover days don’t have to be unproductive days spent recovering on the couch.
Lessons Nausea
When a hangover brings unwanted nausea, ask your medical professional to add in some anti-nausea medication. This will block the actions of chemicals in the body that can trigger nausea and vomiting. It can also be used to prevent such symptoms.
What We Include in Our Hangover Treatments
Here at Mobile IV Stat, we offer various treatments with beneficial vitamins and nutrients. Our hangover recovery therapy, also called a banana bag due to its yellow color, includes all the best to help you recover and feel yourself again.
Ingredients
- 1 Liter IV Fluids
- B-Complex Vitamins: Boosts energy levels, brain function, and cell metabolism
- Vitamin B12
- Toradol: Anti-inflammatory drug (NSAID), Reduces pain and inflammation in the body
- Zofran: Anti-nausea medication to help with vomiting and nausea
Available Add-ons
- Glutathione: Helps detox the body and supports the liver.
- Vitamin C: Helps repair tissues and reduces damage from inflammation and oxidation.
- Zinc: Stimulates cell growth and defends against infection.
So, after your alcoholic cocktails, treat yourself to a cocktail of vitamins!
Should You Get an IV Before or After Drinking?
You’re interested in trying IV hydration therapy for your hangover. Is it best to schedule this treatment before or after your big night on the town or after?
It would be best to plan for hydration therapy after a night of drinking. If you do it before, you’ll be plenty hydrated walking into the bar, but as the night wears on, consuming alcohol and urinating what you drink will decrease your hydration levels more and more.
Even balancing the alcohol you consume with water won’t help as much as you’d think. If anything, you’ll only urinate more often, further dehydrating yourself.
On top of that, water cannot renew electrolytes, so it’s not truly treating dehydration.
Have a fun night, and as soon as you’re conscious the next day, get an IV hydration drip. You’ll be back on your feet within that same day!
Final Thoughts
A night of drinking might be fun, but the debilitating hangover that follows is anything but. Instead of drinking more alcohol to cure your symptoms (which rarely works and can just dehydrate you further), you should consider IV hydration therapy.
This short, efficient treatment will rehydrate you with water and electrolytes. You can also intravenously receive medication to help cure your headache and body pain.
You’ll leave the treatment feeling hydrated, focused, pain-free, and ready to take on the world!