One too many? Try Hangover Heaven in Vegas

It's Sunday lunchtime in Las Vegas, and Justin looks like he wants to curl up and die. He has a monster hangover after drinking for two days solid. But help, he hopes, is at hand.

The 38-year-old from Seattle is among the first customers trying out a new service, Hangover Heaven, which promises to "cure" his throbbing head, sweaty pallor and general feeling of death, all within 45 minutes.

"I knew I was going to drink too much," Justin, an aeronautics industry executive, said with a fragile smile, as an intravenous drip fed nausea-reducing drugs into his left arm. "It's been a guy weekend. We arrived on Thursday. Last night we went out to a club, drank too much, stayed up all night," he added, estimating that he slept for maybe three hours.

Justin - who asks sheepishly not to give his surname - was speaking on board the shiny blue-and-white Hangover Heaven bus, parked outside the Mandalay Bay casino on the southern end of the infamous Vegas Strip.

From the outside it looks like any other tour bus. Inside, the vehicle is rigged out not unlike an ambulance: IV tubes, pulsometers, attentive nurses and, if it all gets too much, soothing, darkened bunks.

The new service, which opened on Aug 14, is the brainchild of Dr Jason Burke.

The trained anesthesiologist, who still works in hospitals locally in his day job, came up with the idea while working with patients in recovery rooms, after qualifying in 2001.

"Watching patients in the post-anesthesia care unit, I noticed that they had a lot of the same symptoms that people with a hangover have: The nausea, headache, aches and pains, and disoriented feeling.

"And I thought maybe these medications that I'm using to treat them in the recovery room couldwork for a hangover," he said.

Happily for him, he lives in the Nevada gambling capital - internationally renowned as a center for partying and intoxication of all kinds, and, of course, the setting for the first of the blockbuster Hangover movies.

"When people come to Vegas and drink, they're much more prone to get a hangover because of the time span over which they drink. It's much longer and they get more dehydrated because they're in the desert. "So it's the perfect set-up for hangovers," Burke said.

He was sitting on the bus outside Caesar's Palace, the latest stop on a constant circuit up and down the sun-soaked Strip to pick up and drop off customers.

The service offers to "cure" shell-shocked morning-after revelers of their hangover, using a combination of anti-nausea and rehydrating drugs, as well as vitamins and other medicines.

The bus promises an "ultra-smooth ride" to spare queasy stomachs, a mid-section with four bunks, a rear lounge, a bathroom and a "private interview room for people who have sensitive medical issues they wish to discuss."

All of this care does not come cheap: there are two basic packages: "Redemption" and "Salvation," offered at the introductory prices of $90 and $150, respectively.

QUESTIONS

1 What new service is offered to visitors in Las Vegas?

2 How is it done?

3 Who started Hangover Heaven?

Answers

1. Cure for hangovers

2. A combination of anti-nausea and rehydrating drugs, as well as vitamins and other medicines.

3. Dr Jason Burke, a trained anesthesiologist