An AA hangover

From the world of silly research, here?s a sozzled piece of wisdom: a hangover can put you off alcohol forever. A Canadian researcher, Dan Bernstein, sincerely believes that.

From the world of silly research, here’s a sozzled piece of wisdom: a hangover can put you off alcohol forever. A Canadian researcher, Dan Bernstein, sincerely believes that he so ‘brainwashed’ 142 people into thinking that they got sick drinking that they immediately abandoned the particular alcoholic beverage that caused that nasty stomach churning. Of course, it would be interesting to meet these 142 people and find out whether some reverse ‘brainwashing’ wasn’t taking place around the same time.

HT Image

One must consider that two-thirds of the world nurses a hangover every day of the year (going by an unscientific study of those who haunt the Press Club of India, a breed with immense expertise on surviving hangovers). In fact, it’s probably rusty old joints such as these that gave rise to the conventional wisdom that says that the best cure for a hangover is a stiff glass of whatever-it-was-that’s-hammering-against-your-head-right-now. Incidentally, it works -- and how!

While it is quite likely that the said two-thirds wake up each morning with a vow to never touch a drop of the poison ever again, history has showed us just how long the headache of keeping such resolutions last. If the cure for alcoholism were as simple as Bernstein seems to believe, he would not have had a research topic in the first place. Or those Anonymous Alcoholics would have been drinking themselves silly.