Have I told you my secret hangover cure? It's this: two milk thistle capsules before dinner, two before bed with a large glass of water and two Nurofen. Never fails, honestly. I got that one from my dentist, who got it from a German anaesthetist who had seen the results of a clinical trial — double blind and everything. Apparently they gave milk thistle to a load of hard-drinking Russians during the Cold War, and within weeks they all had livers like new-born babies.

Clearly all the above is about as scientific as the plotline of Heroes. If I were to try it out on the authors of this report, Rachel Vreeman and Aaron Carroll, of Indiana University School of Medicine, they would no doubt exchange knowing glances before using their steely logic to blow my theory out of the water. Which would be a shame, because I like my theory — and, besides, it works for me.

The problem with their kind of science — ie, the real stuff — is that it is so unimaginative, not to say undemocratic. Why should scientists have a monopoly on the truth? After all, we old wives were there first.

There are two reasons why people cling to fuzzy, half-baked theories. First, they make some sort of sense, albeit in a vague way. Second, they like the idea of being “experts”, even when they are manifestly not.

In the case of a hangover, we hate the thought that there is simply no escape from the nausea and self-loathing.

Deep down we all know this; but still we try. Fry-ups, Berocca, Dioralyte — they may well all be placebos; but it doesn't matter. It's the triumph of hope over reality that keeps us going until 4 o'clock in the afternoon, when the effects of our excesses finally wear off naturally. Real science may have clarity and credibility, but the bogus variety is so much more entertaining.

Besides, aside from being mostly harmless (so what if poinsettias aren't poisonous — you wouldn't want to eat them anyway), many of these scientific myths are very convenient.

So it's not true that we lose most of our body heat through our heads; but can Drs Vreeman and Carroll think of a better way to get a small child to wear a scratchy woolly hat on a cold winter's day? I suspect not. And as for the suicide rate at Christmas, they should try coming to my house on Boxing Day. Next thing you know they'll be telling us that carrots don't make you see in the dark after all.

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