Expert advice from leading hangover specialist Dr. Jason Burke, the first physician in the United States to formally dedicate his career to the study and treatment of veisalgia, the medical term for the common hangover
Dr. Jason Burke is a board-certified anesthesiologist with over 19 years of extensive OR and ICU experience. He is also the founder of a pioneering IV-therapy business called Hangover Heaven, based on his own research and real-life experience with patients during and after surgery. The first Hangover Heaven IV clinic was launched in April of 2012 with a mobile treatment facility in Las Vegas, where he currently resides. To date, Dr. Burke and his team have treated over 20,000 people. I spoke to Dr. Burke this past Sunday.
How did you get interested in hangovers?
It all started because I’m an anesthesiologist, and a lot of the symptoms of a hangover are very similar to the issues people have after anesthesia: nausea, vomiting and brain fog. Treating postoperative nausea and vomiting can be very challenging, especially for outpatient surgery. If a patient is supposed to go home right after surgery but throws up in the recovery room, it can end up requiring supervision in the hospital because there’s a danger of becoming dehydrated. It needs to be treated very aggressively.
After making this connection in 2011, the idea occurred to me to use the same medications for hangovers that are used for postoperative nausea and vomiting. For years, the only things we had in our toolbox were saline solution and perhaps some oxygen. I heard from a number of former military people that when they were in the army, the medics would go around on Saturday or Sunday mornings with saline IVs and oxygen for people who had overindulged the night before. The problem is that when people are in the military they’re usually 20 years old, when hangovers only last for an hour or two anyway. Once you get to 30, a hangover can last all day long, and once you get past 40, it can be a multiday experience. A simple bag of saline isn’t going to cure a severe hangover in a 45-year-old.
What percentage of people suffer from postoperative symptoms?
It all depends on the person’s age, gender, and the type of surgery. For a 70-year-old male who comes in for foot surgery, the incidence of postoperative mental changes, nausea and vomiting is very low, probably less than 1%. But if you get ten 25-year-old females coming in for an abdominal surgery, the postoperative vomiting is probably going to be 20%. Even if you give them medication intra-operatively, they’re still probably going to throw up afterwards.
In other words, the younger the patient, the more likely it is that he or she will experience postoperative symptoms?
Yes, but gender and the type of surgery also matter a lot. The two most likely scenarios for vomiting are gynecological and neurological surgery in a young, healthy female. In fact, anything inside the abdominal cavity of a young female is going to lead to a much higher incidence of postoperative nausea; if she has her gallbladder taken out, she’s going to be more likely to have postoperative symptoms than a 70-year-old male. That’s because the hormones have a lot to do with it. We see the same thing with hangovers. Women tend to experience much more nausea while men tend to get more headaches. And once women do start to throw up, it’s much harder to stop it than in men. It’s the same thing in the recovery room. The young, healthy females who start vomiting will take four or five hours to get over it, whereas if a man throws up after surgery, all he usually needs is a single dose of antinausea medicine and he’s out the door.
In other words, the cause of the nausea is the anesthesia, but the type of operation the patient undergoes will still have an effect on the level of nausea.
It’s a combination of the two. The anesthetic gas is one part of the problem and the surgery is another part. If you give a young, healthy female an infusion of propofol, which is an intravenous anesthetic, she will have a lower likelihood of vomiting than if you use anesthetic gas. Anesthetic gas and alcohol have somewhat similar chemical characteristics.
Why would a postoperative patient have to be admitted for nausea?
You can’t send someone home when she’s actively vomiting after surgery, especially if it was an intra-abdominal type of operation, because if she can’t keep any food or water down, she’s going to end up severely hydrated and at risk of kidney failure and other related issues.
Are the causes of postoperative reactions to anesthesia and a hangover from drinking alcohol the same, or is only the solution the same?
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