Why You Can’t Just Supplement Orally

Often times when we’re making a IV regimen recommendation to a patient, they’re saying, “Well Doc, can’t I just take this orally instead?” And the answer is you can, the reality is while oral supplementation can be beneficial, we still have to go through the GI tract through the lymphatics, through the liver, in order for those nutrients to get assimilated.

With IV Nutrition Therapy what we’re able to do is bypass all that, go directly into the bloodstream, provide it in an active form, so that we can get those therapeutic levels into your system immediately.

And when we say therapeutic levels, what IVs allow us to do is get levels, for instance, vitamin C is a simple example of say 10 grams or 10,000 milligrams into the venous supply, whereas when we do that orally we have to push anywhere from 15, 20, even 30,000 milligrams orally just to get a fraction of that percent of that 30,000 into the bloodstream.

The problem is vitamin C can be very irritating, along with a number of other nutrients, to the GI tract and now we deal with GI irritation and unpleasant side effects when you start pushing those envelopes of what the GI tract can handle.

So IV Nutrition Therapy is a great compliment to an oral dosing protocol already, or for people that struggle in taking supplements orally, whether it’s pill or powder form, they just can’t tolerate the oral supplementation. IV therapy is a great alternative and great option to deliver therapeutic levels into your system.