I have been getting a lot of questions about IV vitamin therapy lately from patients around the clinic. What is it used for? Is it safe? Why get nutrients IV when I can just take an inexpensive multivitamin? Many of these questions can be answered on my website here, but I thought it would be nice to elaborate on a couple of points.
The biggest benefit of IV Vitamin Therapy is that everything inside the IV bag gets delivered directly to where its needed; the cells of the body. No digestion, no absorption, no metabolization and conversion by the liver. Just nutrients where you need them, when you need them. There is no need to worry about which form of magnesium you should be taking and how well it will be absorbed, or if your Vitamin B6 will be metabolized by the liver before it has a chance to have any therapeutic effect. Your body gets 100% of the dose and makes use of whatever it needs.
This is especially important for people who have problems with digestion or absorption such as with pancreatic deficiency, colitis or IBS. These people may go many years with suboptimal nutrient absorption to the point where being deficient begins to feel normal! For them, just a few treatments could give them the boost they need to start feeling like their old (young) selves.
Another reason we choose to use IV vitamin therapy is when we need to deliver a high dose of a specific nutrient that just isn’t possible when taken orally. A good example of this is glutathione, one of the most potent anti-oxidants in the body. Glutathione is useful in the treatment of Parkinson’s Disease, fibromyalgia, hepatitis and detoxification, among other indications. However, glutathione is broken down very quickly when taken orally so that very little of the dose actually gets into the blood stream. They only way to achieve therapeutic effect is by IV administration. The same is true for many other nutrients. With IV therapy, we can do things that are simply not possible with oral vitamins and minerals.
But at the end of the day, probably the most important reason from a patient’s perspective, is that IV nutrients work better and they work faster. Effects are often felt within minutes and are obvious to the person receiving the treatment. I could go on for hours talking to my patients about all of the mechanisms of how and why it works, but when a patient comes back after just a couple of treatments and tells me that they haven’t felt this good in years, that is all the explanation they need.
Yours in wellness,
Michael Frosina, ND
