Time, temperance make best cures for hangovers.

Byline: The Health Files by Tim Christie The Register-Guard

A HANGOVER IS YOUR BODY'S way of saying, "You idiot. You drank too much last night and now you have to pay the piper. So suffer awhile."

Unless you're a teetotaler, chances are you know the feeling: Your head feels caught in an ever-tightening vice. Your tongue feels like you licked the felt off a pool table. Your stomach is queasy, and you feel shaky and cranky.

What might be called the deterrent effect of hangovers is one reason medical science hasn't aggressively pursued hangover cures: No one wants to tempt otherwise moderate drinkers into hitting the bottle harder by removing the hangover hammer looming over their heads.

This time of year, opportunities for drinking abound, with Christmas and New Year's Eve and bowl game parties. It's possible to have fun without drinking, and it's possible to drink without overdoing it. But if you find yourself waking up with hangovers on a regular basis, it may be a sign you've got a drinking problem.

There's one sure-fire way to avoid a hangover: Don't drink. If you do drink, stop after one or two. If you keep going, make sure you eat plenty of food before and while you drink. Drink water between alcoholic drinks, which helps dilute the alcohol and makes you feel fuller. After the party, drink lots of water with some aspirin or ibuprofen before going to sleep.

"It is possible to drink without a hangover occurring," said Scott Swartzwelder, a neuro-psychologist at Duke University Medical Center and a co-author of "Buzzed," a layperson's guide to drugs of abuse, legal and illegal.

But, he said, "If you drink enough to feel a pretty good buzz on, you're probably going to feel it" the next day.

The myriad folk remedies for hangovers may help a little - more on that later - but time is the only sure cure for the morning-after blues, most scientists say.

"Unfortunately, there's no magic bullet," Swartzwelder said.

Hangovers don't just hurt the drinker - they exact a real toll on the economy as well. Absenteeism and poor job performance caused by hangovers add up to $148 billion annually in the United States, according to a study published last year in the Annals of Internal Medicine.

Alcohol researcher Dr. Jeffrey Wiese and colleagues found that most damage and costs from hangovers are incurred not by alcoholics but by light-to-moderate drinkers.

"In the medical community, we tend to focus on alcoholics," Wiese told the Reuters news agency. "But that's a very small number of people, whereas being hung over is a very common thing."

Wiese's research found that 54 percent of alcohol-related problems in the workplace are caused by light drinkers, and 87 percent by light-to-moderate drinkers.

And they found that most everyone has experienced a hangover: 75 percent of men and women who have consumed alcohol report that they've been hung over at least once, and 15 percent experience hangovers at least monthly.

The classic hangover symptoms often are viewed just as discomfort, but a hung over person is at increased risk for injury, the researchers found. Even after alcohol is out of the bloodstream, hangovers impair the motor skills of drivers and pilots, they found.

"Even if you don't feel severely hung over, your cognitive abilities, concentration and technical skills may actually be diminished," Wiese told Reuters.

And drinking to excess, hangover or no, is hard on a body. Too much alcohol hits different parts of the body in different ways, which may be why hangovers can be so tough to fix.

Hangover headaches are caused by dehydration. Alcohol is a diuretic, flushing water from the body, including the brain. Consuming four drinks, for example, can flush a quart of water out of your body over several hours, according to a 1998 study published in Alcohol Health & Research World.

This causes your brain to shrink temporarily. Researchers think dehydration shrivels the dura, the protective membrane covering the brain, according to an article in the British magazine New Scientist. As the dura shrinks, it tugs at pain-sensitive filaments connecting it to the skull.

Alcohol also depletes our sugar reserves, which accounts for the feeling of grogginess and weakness the morning after.

The body's effort to break down alcohol - specifically ethanol and methanol - may also contribute to that run-over feeling. One culprit may be acetaldeyhde, a byproduct of ethanol. Another may be formic acid, a breakdown product of methanol.

The bottom line is, if you're hung over you've flooded your body with a toxic substance and your body is doing the best it can to recover from the assault.

Most scientists and doctors say there's really only one guaranteed cure: the so-called tincture of time. That's cold comfort if you're head feels like it's going to explode. You need help, and you need it now.

There are as many folk remedies for hangover as there are whiskeys in Scotland. Some remedies may help alleviate hangover symptoms, researchers say.

"They're not all entirely wrong," said Carl Waltenbaugh, who studies alcohol at Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill. "Like an urban legend, there's a hint of truth" in some remedies.

FLUIDS: Probably the single best thing you can do is drink water, lots of it. Sports drinks, with electrolytes, help replace minerals and sugar.

PAIN MEDICATION: No matter what method you try, DO NOT take acetaminophen, aka Tylenol, either while drinking or the next morning. It amplifies alcohol's damaging effect on the liver, according to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. Take ibuprofen or aspirin instead, but with caution: Both can irritate the stomach.

VITAMINS AND SUPPLEMENTS: Waltenbaugh said an amino acid supplement called NAC (n-acetyl-cysteine) helps the body metabolize alcohol.

NAC helps restore an essential antioxidant called glutathione that's lost when the body is clearing out the toxic aftereffects of a drinking bout, he said. NAC supplies cysteine, one of the building blocks of glutathione. NAC, sold at health food stores, is used widely by AIDS patients to restore glutathione.

Vitamins C and B-6 also are said to help your body recover from alcohol.

FOOD: Different people swear by different foods. Eggs contain cysteine, which helps body recover from alcohol.

Some people like greasy, fatty foods, such as a cheeseburger and fries. V-8 and other tomato-based drinks and foods may help. Some people swear by menudo, a spicy Mexican soup made with tripe.

SWEAT: A hot bath or shower or, if you're up to it, brisk exercise may help sweat out toxins.

HAIR OF THE DOG: Some researchers think a drink such as a Bloody Mary can ease hangover symptoms, at least temporarily. The theory is that a little alcohol slows the breakdown of methanol, a byproduct of which is formic acid, which may be the real culprit of severe hangover symptoms.

That said: Drinking in the morning is generally not a good idea. It can start a vicious cycle of drinking that merely postpones the hangover. And if you find yourself frequently starting the day with a drink, that's a sign of a drinking problem.

Remember, all this pain can easily be avoided with a little moderation. An ounce of prevention is worth 100 pounds of hangover.