Elaine Young
Fri, Dec 21, 2007
The Straits Times

The party’s over, the bottles are empty and the room has stopped spinning.

But your head is throbbing, your mouth is as dry as the last bottle of white and moving requires superhuman willpower.

Unlike a party, a hangover takes no planning whatsoever, but there are measures you can take to ease the effects and even prevent one altogether.

What is a hangover?
Hangovers are characterised by headaches, nausea, dizziness, irritability, thirst, fatigue and loss of appetite, explains Dr Lee Chiew from Clinique D’Tox in Camden Medical Centre.

‘Hangovers are thought to be caused by an excess of toxins in the blood system. The body cannot process and get rid of them as quickly as required, thus the accumulation – the excess – causes sickness.’

The symptoms of a hangover are then exacerbated by dehydration because alcohol acts as a diuretic. A diuretic reduces the amount of water in the body by encouraging urination.

Curing a hangover
The key to curing a hangover would be to not drink too much in the first place. But, ‘once a hangover has kicked in, time is the only cure,’ says Dr Lee.

There are, however, ways to at least alleviate the symptoms. She suggests taking aspirin to take care of the headache and to drink fluids to offset dehydration.

British nutrition expert Patrick Holford says in his book The New Optimum Nutrition Bible that once the liver’s ability to detoxify alcohol is exceeded, the body produces a toxic substance and it is this that brings about a headache.

His advice for reducing the ‘morning after’ symptoms is to drink a lot of water to dilute the alcohol and also to eat pure foods that will not add to the body’s toxic burden.

Stick to fruit and vegetable juices, which are high in antioxidants, and water.

In a late 2005 issue of the British Medical Journal, researchers studied the effectiveness of hangover cures, but did not find compelling evidence that an effective cure exists. So while some people may swear by certain remedies, is this really another case in which prevention is better than cure?

Avoiding a hangover
In her book The Drinkless Mind, Ms Georgia Foster advocates drinking a glass of water for every glass of alcohol – this will help to dilute the effects of the alcohol and may help you feel fuller and therefore less likely to overdo it.

She says: ‘If you forget this tip when you’re out, then drinking as much water as you possibly can when you get home really does reduce that awful feeling of dehydration when you wake up in the morning.’

Dr Lee suggests that, if you smoke, you should cut down while out drinking. Smoking makes you thirsty and that is only going to encourage a hangover – unless the drinking is non-alcoholic.

Avoid drinking on an empty stomach. Food helps to absorb alcohol, giving the body more time to process it and reducing the risk of a hangover.

‘Eating foods high in protein – such as fish, nuts and beans – before drinking is thought to slow down the alcohol absorption rate,’ adds Dr Lee.

As far as alcohol goes, some types are more toxic than others. Alcohol itself contains toxins, which are the by-products of fermentation and distillation. These toxins are called congeners. Some drinks have more congeners than others, explains Dr Lee, because of the way they are fermented.

Darker drinks, such as red wine, brandy and port, have more congeners than white wine, gin or vodka.

The bubbles in champagne speed up the absorption of alcohol into the bloodstream.

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Barman mixes his own hangover ‘cure’
Mr Calven Khoo (above with his ‘cure’), bar manager at Prime Society restaurant on Dempsey Hill, has a decade of experience and has come across various remedies for hangovers.

He says: ‘Drinking citrus juices, popping Vitamin C tablets and drinking coffee all have certain effects, but they do not address the problem completely.

‘I use bottled jasmine green tea to help detox the liver, honey to provide energy and oranges for their Vitamin C content.’

Combining all these ingredients, says Mr Khoo, is the ideal hangover cure. And it is simple to make too.

Ingredients:
• 120ml green tea
• 45ml orange juice
• One tablespoon honey
• Two slices of orange

Method
Place the slices of orange in a glass. Mix all other ingredients together and pour into the glass with the sliced orange.

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Other ways to sober up
There are some weird and wonderful supposed hangover cures at www.hungover.net. Here is a selection of the more ‘normal’ ones:

Isotonic drinks
Your body will be lacking in salts, so replenish with a sports drink such as Gatorade. The liquid refreshment will help your hangover too.

Sugar
Your body needs sugar to break down alcohol, so munch on a chocolate bar.

Juice
The water in juice rehydrates the body, and the fructose (sugar) it contains helps burn up the alcohol.

Kudzu
A close to nature remedy is the Chinese vine Kudzu. It has been used for curing hangovers since 200BC.

Ginkgo
Ginkgo seeds contain an enzyme that speeds up the body’s metabolism of alcohol.

Supplement
Before going to bed, drink two glasses of water along with Vitamin C and B capsules. The vitamins help to clear alcohol from the bloodstream.

Tue, Aug 19, 2008
The Sunday Times

Foreign wombs for hire

BY: Jamie Ee Wen Wei

For some Singaporean couples desperate to have a baby, surrogacy is the answer if all else fails.

Because renting a womb is illegal here, they turn to countries like Malaysia, the Philippines and India to find a surrogate mother to carry their child.

At least two Singaporean couples are known to have successfully become parents through this method.

In the first case, a couple was reported to have approached the Dr L.H. Hiranandani Centre for Human Reproduction in Mumbai, India, in 2005. It supplied a surrogate mother who delivered a baby boy for them in May 2006.

Mr Low Soo Meng, 50, who runs Greenhouse Adoption Agency which matched couples with surrogate mothers in China, told The Sunday Times that he has also helped a couple become parents.

He started the service in 2006, but added that he stopped it last year because the surrogacy process became ‘too long and complicated’.

For the last three years, another company has also been providing rent-a-womb services to childless couples here and abroad.

Mr Michael Ho, who declined to reveal his age, offers this service under Asian Surrogates, which he set up with his wife. It has a website which is advertised on Google.

For $45,000, they find a suitable surrogate mother overseas, arrange for the medical procedures and take care of the financial and legal issues involved.

He said that he receives about two to three inquiries from couples here every month. Three of his clients have followed up. In the first case, the surrogate mother miscarried, while in the second case a woman is now bearing a child for the couple. He did not want to elaborate on the third case.

‘I found out that there were a lot of people with fertility problems who needed help,’ said Mr Ho, who also runs an employment agency.

Indeed, more couples here are seeking help in the baby-making department.

The Straits Times reported last week that there are at least 2,000 women seeking in-vitro fertilisation (IVF) each year.

Singapore has been plagued by the baby blues for more than 20 years. Its fertility rate of 1.29 last year is far below the 2.1 replacement rate, which explains why the Government will roll out a slew of measures to boost birth rates.

Those thinking of surrogacy head overseas because renting a womb is forbidden here.

While no official figures on surrogacy are available here, a check with several fertility doctors here and overseas revealed that such cases, though rare, are not uncommon.

Dr Ann Tan, a consultant obstetrician and gynaecologist at the Women & Fetal Centre, saw two patients last year who asked about it. One eventually went ahead with the procedure in the United States, where surrogacy is allowed, she said.

Another popular destination is India, dubbed the world’s fertility hub. Doctors there have reported seeing more Singaporean couples seeking egg donations and surrogate mothers over the years.

Dr Sunita Tandulwadkar, head of the department of obstetrics & gynaecology at Ruby Hall Clinic, Pune, India, is one of them.

Last year, a Singaporean Chinese couple flew to the city in western India to search for a surrogate mother to carry their baby, she told The Sunday Times.

They were desperate as the wife could not conceive despite undergoing four cycles of IVF. But after three weeks and several advertisements placed in newspapers there, they still could not find a willing woman. They left the country heartbroken.

Couples who approach Mr Ho will apparently not have such problems. He claimed to have a pool of eight women who are willing to carry a baby for a fee.

These women hail from rural villages in the Philippines and have been carefully screened, he said. All are under 30, married with at least one child, of good health and have at least a high school education.

‘We have contacts in the Philippines who helped us to find these women,’ he said. The women are ‘educated and they know what they are getting themselves into’, he added.

But finding a surrogate mother is just one part of the picture.

Once the couple and surrogate mother enter into a surrogacy contract, they face a potentially risky procedure that will stretch over almost a year.

Mr Ho said the couple will fly to the Philippines to choose the surrogate mother and harvest the eggs and sperm for IVF treatment. After that, the embryo will be implanted into the surrogate mother.

During the pregnancy, the surrogate mother will be taken care of by a ‘coordinator’, usually a neighbour or relative, who will be paid by Mr Ho.

The next time the couple meet the surrogate mother will be when the baby is born. For the nine months of labour, the surrogate mother is paid about $20,000 – half of the entire fee.

But surrogacy is no panacea for childless couples. As with all fertility treatments, there is no guarantee of a baby.

This was the case for a Singaporean couple in their 50s. According to Mr Ho, the surrogate mother suffered a miscarriage during the term and so the couple remain childless today.

The other cases he is handling involves two couples from Thailand. One couple have found a Filipino surrogate mother who is carrying their child.

Doctors interviewed said surrogacy is fraught with medical risks.

First, there are risks in IVF, said Dr Surinder Singh, consultant obstetrician and gynaecologist at the TMC Fertility Centre in Johor Baru. About 30 per cent of its clients are Singaporeans.

The common risks include ovarian hyperstimulation (when the ovaries produce too many eggs in response to the hormone injections) and high-order multiple pregnancies (triplets or more, as they may deliver prematurely).

Second, the surrogate mother may also face complications during the pregnancy and labour.

Legal and medical experts also warned of the legal and ethical issues involved in the procedure.

It becomes especially complicated when the eggs of the surrogate mother is used. This is known as natural surrogacy or the straight method.

Lawyer Alvin Chang from the M&A Law Corporation here said: ‘How do you declare that the child is yours when the birth is by another woman?’

Dr Singh said: ‘It is not as easy as you think. My feel is that couples who go for surrogacy don’t know enough about it. If they understand what they are in for, I think many of them will find that it’s not worth their while.’