So I'm not one to tell you what medications to take or not take , but you certainly would want to do a a quick web search of effects of non steroid uh anti inflammatories um and aspirin before you start taking those or stop taking those for that matter . Generally , they will alleviate headache , but they can often have other issues including liver issues and keep in mind the night after drinking , your liver is already taken a beating because of the need of the liver to convert alcohol from acetyl aldehyde into acetate , which is now a pathway that you well understand . So I'm not certain and in fact , I believe it's not the greatest idea to burden your liver further through the use of things um that are going to cause it to have to work harder and metabolize things .
It allows for more movement of blood and other things through the bloodstream and alcohol tends to induce some vasodilation at least in some of the capillary beds . And then when the alcohol wears off , there's a vasoconstriction and people get brutal headaches . That's why some people will take Aspirin or Tylenol or Advil or things like that .
Hangover is a constellation of effects ranging from headache to nausea to what's sometimes called anxiety , which is anxiety that follows a day of drinking anxiety . I think we can understand physiologically if we think about that process of alcohol intake , increasing the amount of cortisol and the ratio of cortisol to some other stress hormones .
So I'm not certain and in fact , I believe it's not the greatest idea to burden your liver further through the use of things um that are going to cause it to have to work harder and metabolize things . If the goal is simply to alleviate a headache , there's a lot of kind of lore um old school lore about how to relieve a hangover . We already talked about how eating food won't do that , but eating food will prevent the rapid absorption of even more alcohol into the bloodstream .
The gut microbiome is so important for so many different things . In terms of hangover and headache , we know that that's caused by vasoconstriction . The constriction of blood vessels that tends to occur as a rebound after a night of drinking , alcohol can act as a vasodilator .
