I Need an IV Drip to Recover From My IV Drip
New York Times · LC · trust 32/100
Wellness clinics are shooting people up with vitamins, but is the point to actually feel better — or the opposite?
Listen · 7:17 min Share full article 233 Credit... Hannah Whitaker for The New York Times By Amy X. Wang
Remember when needles = bad? It was not so long ago that going to the doctor and getting a premeditated stabbing was something to be feared, because it hurt and the blood was gross and the whole experience was about as pleasant as chewing cement.
It’s different now. We’ve become a needle-happy bunch. We are a culture running full tilt toward little metal spikes , be they for Botox, fillers, microneedling or GLP-1s and the full gamut of other peptides, whatever peptides actually are. (Listen, anyone who claims to completely understand is either a biochemist or a liar.) Needles today signal that you are solving a problem, proactively flourishing. One need not even have a specific health concern to benefit from getting shot up with something, according to the disciples of intravenous drip therapy — a once-strictly-medical procedure that became a faddish hangover treatment for Coachella-goers and is now a near-$3 billion global market of thousands of purveyors treating … anything. And that is how I ended up on a recent Friday afternoon paying $350 for a stranger to poke a small hole in my forearm and funnel a cinder block’s worth of vitamins into it.
In my defense, the place offering the IV drips — a “social wellness club” in Manhattan called Remedy Place that looks like a hair salon got dressed up and went to a cabaret — had been advertised to my eyeballs six million times. There is only so much willpower stored up in the clearly very dry reservoir of my brain. In my defense, famous human beings like Gwyneth Paltrow and Chrissy Teigen and Harry Styles have shared images of themselves hooked up to IV drips in such a way that suggests these drips power the famous human beings Gwyneth Paltrow and Chrissy Teigen and Harry Styles. And that is about the extent of my defense.
Because there’s nothing all that wrong with me, really. Nothing except for this horrible haunting suspicion that everything in my life could be — should be — a lot, or even just a smidge, better.
What kind of IV drip to get? An electrolyte-heavy drip for hydration? A NAD+ drip targeting muscle recovery? Of the algebraic formulas offered on Remedy Place’s website, I opted for the “Remedy Drip” — when you go to a Red Lobster for the first time, you don’t order the chicken — which delivers vitamin C, vitamin B, magnesium, calcium, taurine, lysine, zinc and glutathione for “immunity,” “energy” and “mental clarity.”
Immediately after booking, I was sent a third-party video link to meet with a licensed clinician in Nevada, which triggered sudden-onset hypochondria and made me feel the opposite of better. That the call comprised exactly two questions about medications and family history and lasted 49 seconds also made me feel not-better; same with reading up on IV vitamin therapy’s possible side effects, like nausea, fatigue, dizziness.
We are having trouble retrieving the article content.
Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.
Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.
Thank you for your patience while we verify access.
Read the original at New York Times →
Open in TruthVane →