My favorites, V-8, Gatorade (lemon lime only dammit!), and a nice hot breakfast have all been mentioned, but I tend to also follow up with a handful of Excedrin. The acetaminophen shouldn’t be harmful unless you’re a hardcore (daily) drinker. Also, identifying liquors that just don’t work with you – for example, Jack Daniels and I do not get along so well, so I avoid him entirely.
Cure:
Usually: An aspirin accompanied by either Lucozade, Irn bru, coffee or Coca Cola, spending the morning in bed.
Ideally: a lie-in, sex and a hot shower, followed by a big Ulster fry-up (bacon, potato bread, soda bread, sausages, grilled tomatoes, mushroom, black and white pudding and a fried egg) accompanied by a glass of Guinness.
Sex, grease and hair of the dog…nothing like it to make you feel human.
Prevention:
Don’t mix tequila and red wine.
Don’t drink more than 10 unts of alcohol in one sitting.
Eat both before and afterwards.
Smoking a joint before bedtime is a remedy that has worked for many people…but obviously not one I could recommend on this board.
Umm, don’t drink so much? (I thought someone should state the obvious)
This doen’t mean don’t drink at all, just less.
Brian
Well, that could be part of it.
I had:
3 Margaritas
4-5 beers
2 shots of rum
2 shots of Becherovka
Some hot apple cider with some form of liquor in it
and then 2 more beers.
Normally that wouldn’t be too much, but I admit that’s a pretty good (bad?) variety.
You don’t generally want to take either aspirin or ibuprofen with alcohol: http://kidney.niddk.nih.gov/kudiseases/pubs/analgesicnephropathy/
Tylenol (acetaminophen) is generally easier on the kidneys than other analgesics. Personally, I don’t find that it does much for reducing the pain of a hangover, but then, I don’t generally get bad hangovers; the worst was a night of pubbing after consuming a bottle of cheap merlot–that one resulted in a low-grade but throbbing three-day hangover. I’m one of those that never gets a headache-hangover from beer or straight liquor, and I also (almost always) stay within my tolerance 'cause I don’t like the gastrointestional distress of overdoing it. In general, know your limitations.
The trick with hydration is not just to drink before or after, but to interspace your alcohol with water or club soda (not cola or ginger ale–stay away from sugars). As others have pointed out, it’s best to avoid mixing different types of drinks–don’t alternate tequila shots and Shirley Temples–and in general it’s better to minimize mixed drinks, especially sugary exotics that go down easy but come back to haunt you. Gatorade and tomato juice or V8 are great for replacing electrolytes and staying hydrated–too much plain water just flushes through without being absorbed and can actually be counterproductive. Stay away from fruit juices. For food a gyro or some mildly spicy Punjab or Mughlai food always hits the spot with me.
I know this is going to make many of you sick but when I do have a mild hangover I find the best thing is a nice long, somewhat liesurely run. Once you get past the coughing, cold shakes, and eyeball-popping feeling of the first few minutes, nothing feels better–it’s like taking a cold shower after breaking a fever. Even if you can’t run, getting up and moving around helps you metabolize the residual toxins better than laying about. I’d second irishgirl’s sex & shower plan, but that does require the cooperation of a second party (the solo act just doesn’t cut it for this) and that’s not always an option for one reason or another, even if you are so fortunate as to have a body there. The ex-Irish Girl (no relation) was kind of peeved at me that I didn’t suffer the kind of hangovers that she did, so…that just wasn’t happening.
And avoid the Jaeger (Campion :rolleyes: ). There just is no prophylaxis for that stuff; it’s like sticking your arm in a vat of molten lead to demonstrate the Leydenfrost effect and then realizing that you forgot to first immerse your arm in water. You won’t feel the effect until it’s way too late.
Stranger
Dude, you cannot give me any more :rolleyes: :rolleyes: :rolleyes: than I gave myself. I would use the “young and stupid” defense but it wouldn’t be truthful (or, at least, it would only be half true 
). I had never tried Jaeger before, and, boy, was it just the easiest stuff going down. And then wham! Next thing you know . . .
Kids, let this be a lesson to you, as it has been to me. Jaeger is a tool of Satan.
Lots of people have mentioned hydration, but I haven’t seen anyone mentioned the best hydration-based hangover preventative.
Pedialyte.
I absolutely swear by the stuff. Drink an entire bottle before bed–it’s expensive, but it works very well. Better then gatorade.
I take a couple of multi-vitamins before I start drinking. I’m very bad on hydrating myself; if I were better, maybe I wouldn’t get so hung over.
My cure is to eat a bunch of Cooler Ranch Doritos with melted cheese on top, with plenty of hot or medium salsa. If eat this for dinner instead of something healthy, I can often stave off a hangover altogether. I assume it’s the combination of salts and fats that make it work.
I should’ve appended a 
to that message; I was just funning you. One of the toughest things about bartending is trying to convince a customer that no he or she does not need another Jaeger, Zombie, or Kamikaze. As visions of this person passing out and choking in their own effluvia followed by liability suits and job-denying publicity zip past your eyes you try to reason with a drunk person, which is like trying to teach a pig to sing but worse because at least the pig will get annoyed and wander off after a while.
I’d go one further and say that Jägermeister is a distillation of pure, unremitting, undiluted, irredeamable, refined, concentrated, fortified, unleavened, and implacable evil. Don’t just stay away from it; run far, far away.
Stranger
Bf and I both have done some experimentation with this kind of stuff.
Extensive research at a three day concert/beer festival yielded the following results:
Chaser didn’t do much of anything.
RU-21 seemed to work very, very well indeed.
YMMV, of course
Yup, I was about to suggest Pedialyte. I haven’t attempted this method myself (I don’t usually get hangovers), but I have a few friends that swear by it.
I take a “B complex” vitamin before I start drinking, and chug some water if it’s around. I don’t smoke pot if I’m too drunk either (BAAAAD combo! Talk about room-spinning!). I drink water before bed - not cold water because that really gets my stomach churning. Sometimes I eat something too - just toast with a little bit of butter on it or something. Then just leave some water bedside to drink during the night, and I’m usually good in the morning. If not, I eat something, bread or soup (or both), and drink some ginger ale. I think the carbonation helps to settle my stomach or something. I’ve also learned my limits, which helps immensely. I also have a pretty high tolerance for alcohol (bad because I drink more, but good because I don’t usually drink so much that I get sick).