Australia Has Gotten Its First Intravenous Hangover Clinic

There is no shortage of quick and dirty hangover "cures" out there.

From the dadhi of medieval Iraq, made from 50 pounds of date syrup with five pounds of honey, to greasy LA breakfast sandwiches, to Bolivian bull penis soup, the sheer number of professed hangover antidotes suggests that the human desire to get wasted transcends culture.

But the universality of heavy drinking also comes with an equally pervasive desire to numb the physical pain that follows a night of partying.

Though none of these food-based cures has been proven to work, they sure make hangovers a little more enjoyable. But for those who have graduated to a level of drinking where the steak and eggs just don't cut through the Sunday morning fog anymore, there are more medically oriented solutions beginning to emerge.

Why eat a hangover cure when you can mainline it? That's exactly what the Hangover Clinic in Sydney, Australia is proposing this holiday season, the Sydney Morning Herald is reporting. More specifically, the clinic will be pumping patients with saline, sodium, minerals, vitamins, oxygen, and anti-nausea medication—through their veins.

Despite the good intentions of the clinic, which aims to help hungover people as effectively as possible, public health officials are not exactly thrilled about a business which thrives on giving binge drinkers the easiest morning after possible.

"This encourages people to use alcohol in an entirely inappropriate way and it's something the government should look at very, very carefully," Michael Moore, the chief executive of the Public Health Association of Australia, told the Sydney Morning Herald. "After all the hard work that has been done to reduce the harm associated with alcohol… This is ridiculous."

But the Hangover Clinic's co-founder Max Petro shot back by saying that he is not causing any problems but simply alleviating something that is already there. "There has been some criticism suggesting we're encouraging binge drinking. We don't serve alcohol. We are not a pub. We encourage binge drinking as much as hospitals encourage people to get sick," he told the Sydney Morning Herald.

The owner of the clinic also claims that the idea of intravenous hangover cures came during his own partying days on Australia's ski slopes. "The ski patrollers, who are all qualified paramedics, were always last out at night and first up in the morning," Petro told the Sydney Morning Herald. "I always wondered how they did it until one day, they let me in on their secret. They took me into their little ski shack and they were all hooked up to IVs and oxygen. So next time I was a bit dusty, I knocked on their door and asked if I could give it a crack. It's been in the back of my mind ever since."

This is hardly the first IV-based hangover cure catering to partied-out young people. Both New York and Las Vegas have moblie hangover clinics, which can intravenously heal hangovers literally by the busload.

Perhaps one day, future civilizations will look back at the IV hangover clinic as a strange vestige of the West's fixation with medicine, and, between slurps of hot soup, wonder why such Luddites would ever opt for such a tasteless solution.

WATCH: Hangover Cures: Asian Style with Nick Liu