Why ‘kutoa lock’ doesn't cure your hangover, it delays it

In Kenya, kutoa lock is the street term for nursing a hangover with more alcohol, and it is the same practice known internationally as "hair of the dog."

It is just one entry in a long list of claimed hangover cures.

Others include greasy food, bone soup, coffee, and simply sleeping it off. Of these, kutoa lock is the one that comes with the clearest scientific explanation for why it feels like it works, and why it doesn't actually fix anything.

The idea has been around for centuries.

A 17th-century English translation of the works of Ambroise Paré, a French barber-surgeon regarded as one of the fathers of modern surgery, describes the practice in the context of rabies, where fur from the dog that bit you was placed on the wound in the belief that it would draw the poison back out through a kind of sympathetic bond between animal and victim.

Also Read: ‘Our horrible experiences after taking suspicious alcohol’

Physicians later extended the same reasoning to drinking. The Venetian doctor Santorio Santorio argued that heavy drinking clogged the body's humours and trapped alcohol's harshest effects inside, and that a morning drink would trigger the "evacuations" needed to flush it out and restore balance.

Kutoa lock persists because, for a short while, it genuinely seems to work. A hangover brings together a cluster of physical and psychological effects: headache, fatigue, low appetite, dizziness, nausea, vomiting and anxiety, sometimes lasting a few hours, sometimes stretching past a day.