IV therapy is a wonderful way to get the nutrition, hydration, medication, or support you need for a variety of conditions or simply for better health. At Herrera Medical Group in Flower Mound, TX, this therapy is just one way that we provide well-rounded support so you can live life to the fullest.
How Often Should You Do IV Therapy?
Start With Diagnostic Tests
Before we can determine the best rate on how often should you do IV therapy for your health needs, it’s important to determine what you actually need and how often you need it. This starts with a consultation where we find out about your health needs, any diagnosis you’ve received, and generally how you’re feeling. This gives us an idea of what to test for and can help us make the right plan for you.
Base a Treatment Plan on Your Needs
If you’re getting customized therapy for cancer, for example, you might take a high-dose vitamin C therapy several times a week to protect your immune system and give yourself the power to fight back. If you’re generally healthy, IV therapy just once or twice a month could be enough to infuse your body with the nutrients it needs for optimal wellness and performance.
Make Adjustments Along the Way
As we continue giving you this therapy, we can administer tests to find out exactly how the therapy is helping your unique condition. Then we can make adjustments as needed until you’re getting just exactly what you need, as often as you need it.
Understand General Averages
For many people with health issues, six cycles of therapy are enough to start. For those seeking a general boost to energy and vitality, a few cycles initially followed by once a month or bimonthly therapy is often appropriate. Most people will notice a significant improvement after just one drip, but even so, plan for it to take about a month before you can fully consider the rate of improvement.
Why Consider an IV Drip?
What It Is
IV therapy sends nutrients directly into the bloodstream via an intravenous connection. In nearly all cases, this IV also contains water so that your body is getting both hydration and nutritional support at the same time.
What the Body Needs
All bodies, including human bodies, depend on getting the right nutrients for effective functioning and total wellness. In particular, there are certain vitamins our bodies can’t produce that we need to get from elsewhere. Many of the nutrients we need our bodies can make, but those it can’t are known as “essential vitamins and minerals.” We must get these from an outside source.
Why We Aren’t Getting What We Need
Without the right vitamins, the body can’t run its natural processes correctly. A well-balanced diet in proper proportion should have all the vitamins and minerals that the healthy human body needs, though, so why do we need therapy involving intravenous drips?
Dietary Choices
For some of us, the problem is what we’re eating. While we all strive to eat a healthy diet, it can be hard to do so. In some cases, getting a truly well-balanced meal every time can be too expensive. In other cases, convenience is a problem, and our life and work demands simply don’t allow us to source and prepare a well-balanced meal.
Soil Depletion
While eating fresh fruits and vegetables is still one of the best ways to ensure good health, soil depletion from modern intensive agriculture means that each successive generation of freshly grown food has slightly less nutrition than the one before it.
This is because these plants take their nutrition from the soil, and modern farming techniques do not do well at replacing that nutrition. If the soil’s nutrition is depleted, the plants will be malnourished. You can mitigate this issue somewhat by sourcing fresh foods from organic farms, and especially locally grown produce where traditional farming methods are practiced, but not everyone can afford to do so, and such choices aren’t readily available everywhere.
Malnourished Animals
Not only are we not getting the nutrition from these plant foods that we once did, but the animals we typically eat aren’t getting enough, either. Factory-farmed cows, for instance, are usually fed a non-natural diet high in corn, molasses, and anything that will fatten them quickly. These don’t have the nutrition the cow really needs to thrive, and they pass that depletion on to us.
Illness and Stress
Even eating a well-balanced, healthy diet of highly nutritious foods may not be enough if you’re fighting a chronic disease like diabetes or acute illness such as cancer. When you make extra demands of your body, it needs extra support. In some cases, such as with some autoimmune diseases or IBS, the very condition itself may be blocking your body from absorbing the nutrition it needs.
For other people, stress and constant daily exertion, such as exercise, can be depleting vitamin stores. Take vitamin C as an example. The human body can’t make this vitamin, but we can store small amounts. This vitamin supports the very structure of our body at the cellular level and protects us from the damaging effects of the stress hormone, cortisol. Whenever our stress hormones are produced, vitamin C is depleted as it gets used up. If we are living under constant high stress, we need far more vitamin C than we normally would.
Why Supplements Don’t Work
Most people can easily access vitamin supplements from the store, so why consider IV vitamin therapy? It all comes down to whether or not the vitamin can be used by the body and how well. This isn’t an issue unique to supplements and IVs. It’s also an issue even with the food we eat.
Bioavailability
We all know, for instance, that nuts and seeds are packed with nutrients, but the reality is that we don’t always get all that nutrition when we eat these foods. Both contain something called phytic acid, which binds to nutrients and blocks them from being absorbed by the body. This doesn’t mean the foods are unhealthy: simply that we aren’t absorbing as much nutrition from them as the label says they contain.
Digesting Oral Supplements
Oral vitamin supplements have the same issue. It’s very hard to say how much of any supplement is actually being absorbed. Too many things impact our digestion of vitamins. Some, for example, need fat in order to be absorbed, so ingesting those on an empty stomach means much of the nutrition is lost. Others may be blocked by something within our own systems. Even age can be an issue. The older we get, the less efficient our bodies are at absorbing nutrition from any source.
The Superiority of IV Nutrition
IV nutrition is the only 100% bioavailable nutrition for people of every age and condition. Because intravenous therapy bypasses the digestive system entirely and goes straight to the bloodstream, there’s never a question about how much of the nutrition actually makes it into the body. All of it does. You have guaranteed delivery of all the vitamins, electrolytes, or minerals you need, and absorption is nearly immediate. That’s why you generally feel the beneficial effects right away.
Why Consider IV Therapy?
Improve Overall Wellness
There are many aspects to wellness, from the mental to the physical and emotional, and fueling the body with plenty of nutritious support affects every part of the equation. Our bodies run better and fight off disease more efficiently when they have all the nutrition they need. Our brains function at their optimum when there’s no lack of any crucial nutrient.
Our emotions, which are highly dependent on hormone levels, run and respond more smoothly when our hormones have the right nutritional support. When your body has everything it needs, you can expect greater mental clarity, less susceptibility to anxiety and depression, more strength and energy, better sleep, and a heightened ability to fight off illness.
Slow Down Aging
Aging takes a toll on us all, but this therapy delivers antioxidants, nutrients, hydration, and more that support the body in getting rid of things like free radicals that speed up the aging process. A well-nourished body has healthier skin and hair and shows fewer wrinkles.
Enhance Physical Performance
Whether you’re an athlete or simply have a job with enormous physical or mental demands, you’ll see better performance when you give your body a constant supply of the important nutrients it needs to keep up those tasks. With good hydration, plenty of nutrition, and enough hydration, you can expect to see yourself perform at the highest possible level consistently.
Recover From a Night Out
As we age, our ability to bounce back from having a few drinks too many drastically slows down. The best choice is always to avoid over-drinking, especially on a regular basis. But for those occasional times when a special event calls for a splurge, IV treatment can get you back on your feet and at full strength quickly.
Get Support for Chronic Conditions
Seek medical help from a trusted medical clinic. chronic fatigue, IBS, migraines, fibromyalgia, nutrient-absorption disorders: these all take a terrible toll on the body and can make every day a battle much harder than it should be. If you’re battling all the symptoms that come with these issues, such as exhaustion, dizziness, insomnia, discomfort, and stomach issues, you will find that infusing your body with the nutritional support it needs can ease symptoms and restore energy.
Get Diet Support
Weight loss is a challenge for everyone, and one reason our bodies impel us to overeat is that they are lacking in some crucial nutrient or other. When you get regular infusions of critical nutrients, you help out your weight loss efforts in two ways. First, your body no longer feels desperate for a certain vitamin or mineral, making it just a bit easier to make smart food choices. Perhaps more importantly, your body has the energy it needs to engage in regular exercise and stay active.
Fight Illness
Whether it’s cancer or the flu, the body fights illness better when it’s properly hydrated and fortified with nutrients. When you come to talk to us, we can help you choose the right cocktail of nutrients to support your system depending on the illness you’re suffering from. At Herrera Medical Group, we offer complete medical support for the whole family. We view you as a whole person and want to help you not only overcome illness but be the strongest, healthiest person you can be in every aspect of life.
Learn More About Intravenous Support
If you’re interested in this therapy and what it could do for you, visit Herrera Medical Group in Flower Mound, TX now and set up an appointment to come talk with us. Dr. Edward Kremer, MD is a Texas native with many years of full-time medical practice experience and will be happy to talk with you about how we can best support your wellness.
