Does anything actually cure a hangover? Sauna, cold and IV drips

The hangover cure is one of the most profitable ideas in wellness, and it has been tested. The conclusion of the best available review is unusually direct: nothing works well.

That does not mean nothing helps at all. It means the things people sell as cures, including the heat, cold, and drip options that wellness venues now offer, have no good evidence of shortening or resolving a hangover.

One of them, the sauna, is not merely useless but actively works against you. That is the part worth knowing before you book a recovery session for the morning after.

What does the evidence say?

A systematic review found nothing compelling.

The reference is Pittler, Verster and Ernst in the BMJ in 2005, a systematic review of randomised controlled trials of interventions for preventing or treating alcohol hangover. It assessed the trials that existed across a wide range of proposed remedies.

The conclusion was that no compelling evidence exists to suggest any conventional or complementary intervention is effective for preventing or treating alcohol hangover, and that the most effective way to avoid one is to drink less.

Twenty years on, the picture has not fundamentally changed. Individual small trials of various compounds appear periodically, and none has produced a replicated, meaningful effect. The review is old, and it remains the honest summary.

Why is a sauna the worst option?

You are dehydrated and hypotensive already.

A hangover involves fluid loss, disrupted sleep, low blood sugar in some people, and often a headache with a raised heart rate. A sauna adds heavy sweating, further fluid loss, and a drop in blood pressure to all of that.

The subjective story is that you sweat it out and feel cleansed. What actually happens is that you feel temporarily better in the room, from warmth and distraction, then worse afterwards from deeper dehydration.

There is also a safety edge. Fainting in a sauna is most likely when you are dehydrated and your blood pressure is low, which describes a hangover precisely. If alcohol is still in your system, the risk is considerably higher. Our guides on alcohol and sauna and what to do if you feel faint cover both, and neither is theoretical.

At a glance

Option	Does it cure a hangover?	Notes
Sauna or steam	No, and it makes dehydration worse	Highest fainting risk of anything here
Cold plunge	No	Feels sharpening; no effect on the hangover
IV vitamin drip	No good evidence	You are paying mostly for saline
Sweating it out	No	Alcohol is metabolised by the liver, not the pores
Coffee	No	May help alertness, adds diuresis
Painkillers	Symptom relief only	Never paracetamol-heavy dosing after alcohol
Fluids and electrolytes	Helps the dehydration part	Does not shorten it
Food	Helps if blood sugar is low	Modest
Time and sleep	The only thing that resolves it	Unwelcome, accurate

What about IV vitamin drips?

Fast saline, expensive framing.

Hangover IV drips are now a standard offer in wellness clinics and in some cities as a mobile service. What is in the bag is usually saline, sometimes with B vitamins, vitamin C, and an anti-nausea or anti-inflammatory medication.

The saline does rehydrate you faster than drinking, which is a real effect if you are genuinely depleted. The vitamins are almost certainly doing nothing for a hangover in a person who is not deficient, and the added medications are simply drugs you could usually take orally.

Against that, an IV is an invasive procedure with a small infection and vein-injury risk, and it is expensive. Our guide on IV therapy and vitamin drips covers what the category can and cannot do. Oral fluids reach the same place for the price of a bottle of water.

Does a cold plunge help?

It feels sharpening, and changes nothing.

Cold immersion produces a large adrenaline and noradrenaline response, so you feel alert and awake afterwards. That is real, and it is why people swear by it the morning after.

What it does not do is affect the mechanisms of a hangover: the inflammatory response, the disrupted sleep architecture, the acetaldehyde metabolism, or the dehydration. You get a temporary alertness spike on top of an unchanged hangover.

There is also a safety point. Cold shock is a cardiac stress, and doing it while dehydrated, poorly slept, and possibly still processing alcohol is not the moment for it. If any alcohol remains in your system, skip it entirely. Our cold plunge safety guide covers who should avoid it.

Can you sweat alcohol out?

No, and this myth deserves a specific answer.

Your liver metabolises alcohol at a fixed rate that sweating does not accelerate. A negligible fraction leaves through breath, urine and sweat, and no amount of heat changes the timeline. This is the same misunderstanding behind the sauna-as-detox claim generally, which our guide on whether sweating detoxes your body covers.

Worth stating plainly for a practical reason: if you are still over the limit, a sauna will not sober you up before driving. People do believe this and it is dangerous.

The hangover itself is not the alcohol either. By the time you have a hangover, most of the alcohol is gone; what remains is the aftermath, which is why nothing that targets “flushing it out” makes mechanistic sense.

So what actually helps?

Fluids, food, painkillers with care, and time.

Rehydrate with water or an electrolyte drink, since fluid loss is a genuine component and replacing it addresses that component. Eat something, especially if you feel shaky, because low blood sugar is part of the picture for some people.

For headache, an anti-inflammatory is generally more useful than paracetamol, and paracetamol combined with heavy alcohol use is specifically worth avoiding because of how both are processed by the liver. If you take other medication or have liver or stomach issues, ask a pharmacist rather than guessing.

Then sleep, and wait. Time is the only intervention that resolves a hangover, and that has been the finding for twenty years. If you want to spend money on wellness the morning after, a quiet dark room is better value than any of the options above. Our guide on whether a sauna or cold plunge before bed helps you sleep covers the sleep side for normal days.

FAQ

Why do so many recovery studios market hangover packages? Because demand is enormous and the alternative product, “wait it out”, is not sellable. The offers are legal and the claims are usually vague enough to avoid being testable.

Is a hair of the dog a real thing? It delays the hangover by reintroducing alcohol; it does not treat it. It is also a pattern worth being careful with.

What about electrolyte powders and hangover supplements? Electrolytes address dehydration, which is a component. The proprietary hangover supplements have not demonstrated meaningful effects in the trial literature.

If I do go to a sauna anyway, how do I do it safely? Hydrate first and throughout, take the lowest bench, keep it short and cooler than usual, never go if any alcohol remains, and leave at the first sign of lightheadedness.

The bottom line

A systematic review of randomised trials found no compelling evidence that any intervention effectively prevents or treats a hangover, and the picture has not changed since. The wellness options are not exceptions to that.

A sauna is the worst of them, because it deepens the dehydration and raises the fainting risk in exactly the state that makes fainting most likely. Cold gives you an alertness spike over an unchanged hangover, and an IV drip mostly sells you saline at a steep markup. Fluids, food, and time are the honest answer.