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.
At the clinic the next day, after being shown into a black-curtained room and draped with a faux-fur blanket, I pressed my designated nurse about things that could go wrong. He assured me that most Remedy Drippers just reported tasting Flintstones vitamins in their mouths for a few hours afterward. Then, lancing my inner elbow crease, he asked, was there anything in particular I was looking for the drip to do?
“What will it do?” I said.
“Exactly,” he said.
“No, I’m asking: What will it do?” I said, to which he said, “Right,” and we did that funny dance of mutual bewilderment where we stared at each other like a deer trying to work out if the other deer is a pair of headlights or what.
Then he laughed, forgivingly, and told me most people said the drip made them “feel really, really good.” He screwed it in — a neon yellow-green ooze that would slosh around in plastic and down down down into my bloodstream over the course of 45 minutes — and left me alone to my betterment.
I sat back and observed the bettering flowing into me. Following in the legacy of Teigen and Styles et al., I took a selfie. I had gotten an IV drip before — but in the fluorescence of a hospital room, not dangling on a tufted chaise longue with $12 Erewhon mangos on offer and oontz-oontz-oontz beats crooning from the ceiling. The incongruity of my surroundings was so odd, like snow in July or a chair revealing itself to be a cartoon character.
Then, back home, I felt neither worse nor better. The promised “really, really good” never arrived. I tasted Flintstones. Or maybe I was only convincing myself I tasted Flintstones. Where were the spurts of energy or eurekas? Surely, the $3 billion global IV drip market isn’t built on pure fantasy; surely people around the world aren’t doing corporate IV drip parties and open-air IV drip movie nights and at-home IV spas just for some great game of pretend? I asked Peter Lurie, a physician and co-author of a study on IV hydration spas, to assess the efficacy of my Remedy Drip. It seems “likely to relieve vitamin deficiencies, but little else,” he said, calling it “a witch’s brew with about the same likelihood of success as, well, a witch’s brew.” (“That’s certainly not the guest experience we seek to provide,” a Remedy Place representative told me, adding that the drip is formulated with “proprietary, higher doses” of vitamins.)
A week later, I looked back at my selfie from the black-curtained room. Perhaps it was the mood lighting, but I was startled to see I looked wan — tired around the eyes and irritable and a little sad. The tube poking out of my arm and linking to the vitamin bag looked like a phone charger or an umbilical cord: There I was, receiving vital care, invaluable help. So maybe I am in fact better now than I was, I thought, looking at that picture.
Or maybe it was a trick of the mind. If you go out and pay for a treatment that has been long associated with some level of sickness, perhaps you later feel regardless of the treatment’s actual effects that you must’ve been sick. And then the more time passes, the more that memory quakes and muddies and reshuffles the order of events, so the past is always trickling down into you in a kind of mixed-up sludge.
I wanted to go back and do another IV drip to suss out the true timeline of events — which comes first, self-awareness or self-delusion? — but then I remembered that the $350 didn’t even include the service tip, and that when I asked for water, it arrived in a plump glass bottle and cost an extra $8.
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