Add This UCLA Professor To The List Of People Teasing Us With A Definitive Hangover Cure

Socrates Johnson7 years ago

A tragedy in three acts:

Act 1. Some scientist in some lab somewhere claims to have invented a hangover cure.

Act 2. A news outlet picks up the story of this supposedly groundbreaking scientific development.

Act 3. I read said story. With a twinkle in my eye, I imagine Sundays spent skipping through fields of daisies instead of spent sprawled face down on my couch with the Golf Channel on in the background, not sure if I need to take a terrible shit or puke my brains out. Like a kid on Christmas morning anticipating dad walking through that door with his pack of cigarettes or a hip-hop fan waiting for Dr. Dre to drop The Chronic, I hold onto some naive hope that that the hangover cure is coming to a Rite Aid near me. But it never comes.

Ok, so that third act may need some trimming, but you catch my drift. Needless to say, you can imagine that when I saw this recent story that a UCLA professor may have just invented some pill that can cure hangovers, I was skeptical to say the least.

From Digital Trends:

According to Yunfeng Lu, a professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering in the Los Angeles university, there is now a solution to that all-powerful, all-consuming hangover, and it has been tested (successfully) in mice. In tests, Lu and fellow professor Cheng Ji, an expert in liver diseases from Keck School of Medicine at the University of Southern California, and Lu’s graduate student Duo Xu, found that the treatment decreased the blood alcohol level in inebriated mice by 45 percent in four hours.

More impressively, the concentration of acetaldehyde, the carcinogenic compound that is responsible for causing headaches and vomiting during bouts of irresponsible drinking, “remained extremely low” in treated mice. And finally, Lu’s team found that the mice who were treated with the compound awoke from their alcoholic slumber more quickly than mice who did not receive the treatment.

Well, I’m sure mouse alcoholics everywhere are just ecstatic about this news, but I’m not sure how this helps me or other human binge drinkers with our current predicament.

It’s true what they say about drinking after college. Having been out in the real world for a few years now, I can definitively say that my hangovers are significantly worse than they were in my undergrad days. If they came out with a hangover pill, I wouldn’t care how much it cost. The next Martin Shkreli could come around and jack the price of that pill up to $1,000 a pop, and I would still take out multiple loans to buy that stuff in bulk. But let’s face it: a hangover cure is never coming. It’s just not. Do we have the technology to make it happen? Of course we do. But the hangover is God’s punishment for Sodom and Gomorrah or some shit like that. It’s just the eternal fate of all boozers everywhere, and it’s something we need to accept.

So hopefully there’s a decent tournament on the Golf Channel this weekend, because my Sunday is already booked..

[via Digital Trends]

Image via Shutterstock