One of the big health and wellness crazes sweeping the nation is hydration and vitamin IV therapy. It seems like everywhere you go a new IV therapy clinic is opening. Clinics are popping up in strip malls, medical complexes, and even main street storefronts. But do the treatments they offer really work?
If you’ve been looking for the skinny on hydration and vitamin IV therapy, this post is right up your alley. You will not learn everything there is to know by reading it, but you’ll at least understand the basics by the time you reach the end. So if you’re ready, let’s get started.
What It Is
Hydration and vitamin IV therapy is a therapy designed to flush the body with vitamins and minerals by way of a standard IV. If you don’t know what an IV is, it is a way of introducing medicines directly into the bloodstream by sending them through a tube inserted into a vein.
Lone Star Pain Medicine is a Weatherford, TX pain management clinic that includes hydration and vitamin IV therapy in its menu of services. They say that the therapy is based on something known as Myers’ cocktail.
Myers’ cocktail is the brainchild of late Baltimore physician John Myers, who believed vitamin infusions could be used effectively as a treatment for all sorts of medical conditions. Many of the conditions he attempted to treat with the cocktail were not improved by it. Still, the principle of enhancing human health through supplemental vitamins and minerals has merit.
What It Can Ostensibly Do
As you can imagine, hydration and vitamin IV therapy is highly controversial due to Myers’ history. Even today, many clinics advertising the therapy make some pretty wild claims about it. It is said that IV therapy can help with:
- weight loss
- nutritional deficiencies
- toxin and free radical cleansing
- cardiovascular health
- recovering from a hangover.
The most commonly cited benefits of the therapy are increased energy levels, reduced anxiety, and greater relaxation. Reputable clinics like Lone Star Pain Medicine suggest hydration and vitamin IV therapy might lead to better health simply by providing the body with an ample supply of the nutrients it might not otherwise be getting through a person’s normal diet.
Anecdotal Evidence Abounds
The medical community has worked hard to discredit Myers since his death in the 1980s, largely due to a lack of scientific evidence in support of his claims. Unfortunately, that happens far too often in modern medicine. If a new therapy or treatment is proposed without clinical evidence approved by the FDA, it is automatically dismissed as quackery.
It is true that there haven’t been a whole lot of clinical studies looking into whether hydration and vitamin IV therapy does everything Myers claimed it could. But the anecdotal evidence for some of it abounds. So many people who regularly receive the therapy claim to feel better. They report better overall health.
The claims about feeling better make sense based on what we know about how the body uses vitamins and minerals. For example, we know that vitamin C plays a role in fighting viral infections. We know that vitamin D and calcium both contribute to good bone health. So making sure the body has enough of the vitamins and minerals it needs should lead to better health.
Ultimately, every person needs to decide for themself whether hydration and vitamin IV therapy is a good choice. If nothing else, there is very little risk of being harmed by the therapy as long as it’s done by a trained practitioner.