AIBU to have been shocked of the selling of IV drips in our shopping centre.

[Trialanderror02]

Hi
bit of background my DD has intestinal failure, and so requires IV nutrition via a central line every day for 14 hours. This has landed us in many tricky dangerous situations over the years. Her IV nutrition bags are for fluids / vitamins / micro elements / metals / glucose. This bags are yellow fluid not usual IV saline bags.
We were shopping yesterday for pyjamas in Westfield’s and I was shocked to discover in a pop up seating area with IV stands and 2 women taking selfies attached to these exact looking IV bags, apparently this is a thing 🙈 I looked at the “ menu “ which literally looked like a cocktail bar menu. You could design you own IV bag by adding certain elements for more money etc.
Am I behind the times to be shocked about this casually being sold in the middle of a shopping centre ?
One of them is called a party drip.

@TiredSloth yeh I know haha that’s why I said at the beginning I may aswell post the bag as I already outed myself 🤣

This is horrible. Why would anyone want to be pumped full of “who knows what” in the middle of a shopping centre.

I’ve never seen this. It sounds so disrespectful.

It has been common in LA with celebs and models for years. It is bloody expensive for a massive hit of vitamins that you will at best pee out.

@Trialanderror02 sorry I didn’t see that! As long as you’re aware

@SonjaMorgan unless they are actually low in them to it wouldn’t make any difference haha I don’t judge the people who are buying it I judge the people selling it.

It’s bizarre. A fool and his money are easily parted.

What the actual fuck. The damage ive seen from dodgy IV injection. Seen a man bleed to death from it and they're doing this? I cant believe this

infection
blood clot
&
with covid
done by someone in unhygienic conditions
?how is this allowed?

Horrific, but more fool them as they are just paying stupid amounts of money to quite literally piss it down the drain a few hours later.

This should absolutely not be normalised👎🏻

A friend of mine has these regularly, she’s a runner and regularly had them before and after races.
All in the privacy of her own home though.
I was also advised them during hyperemesis... which looking back I could really have done with 😂

OP you’re not wrong that this is deranged. Why anyone would have an IV infusion unnecessarily is beyond me, and I’d have to question the ethics of the doctors who are prescribing these, and the nurses who are making and administering them.

I can’t see any details of the actual medicines used, but given the ability to tailor the drips, and from photos online, they are presumably licensed bags of glucose or saline, with vitamins and electrolytes added using a needle and syringe. If these are made up immediately before administration the risk of infection is relatively low, but still... madness.

However, these are NOT Vamin. Vamin is an amino acid (protein) mixture used as one of the ingredients in parenteral nutrition. The bag in your photo will be a mixture of amino acid solution, glucose, vitamins, electrolytes and water. (I’ve also spilled PN all over myself at work - the smell was terrible and it was pretty sticky, but it didn’t burn?)

I know you are concerned about PN supply security - and rightly so in my opinion - but nothing these Get a Drip people are doing significantly affects the availability of either your DD’s bespoke bags, or the off the peg bags you have as backup.

Having said all that, people using IVs as fashion accessories is crass, and I can see why it gives you the rage.

This isn’t a new thing. I’ve seen them in America (especially Vegas) for years. Must have been about 7 years since I first saw it - hangover cure a speciality apparently.

@Thismustbelove

How it is legal to inject someone with a cocktail of who knows what in public?

My thoughts exactly??!!!

I just looked at one of the links and they refer to their staff as ‘ambassadors’. That says straight away these aren’t overseen by people with any sort of medical background.
Beauty therapists insert Botox, herbal medicine shops drip candle wax into people’s ears, and now this. These practices should be made illegal not only because of the contents of the treatment but the people administering them are in no way qualified to do so. E.g. tattoo shops are under strict regulation but these businesses can call their products ‘treatments’ and fall under different categories and different regulatory bodies. It’s a dangerous game.

I’m absolutely shocked that this is allowed
There’s no way I’d allow a non-medical person to give me a perfusion of God-knows what, that may or may not be contaminated. It’s foolhardy at best, and downright dangerous at worst!

@WiseUpJanetWeiss I am aware it’s not 100 percent the same, the suppleness however are. We have off the shelf bags in the cupboard where the vitamins etc still need to be put in absolutely sterile.
I do feel for the people in America a while ago we’re having supply issues
We are in a big international group of gastro sufferers and I was shocked how much they were effected however I was shocked to se it over here in the U.K.

Absolutely fucking insane.

Haha talking of which I should probably flush her IV bag off now 🙈

I saw these in California a good decade ago.

@Thismustbelove

How it is legal to inject someone with a cocktail of who knows what in public?

Because they are being prescribed by doctors, and prepared under their supervision. It’s not dissimilar to the administration of Botox in beauty clinics (although that’s now at least licensed for wrinkle treatment now).

They do appear to be sailing very close to the wind on medicines advertising law though www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-48839108

Iv injection is entirely different to something like botox. Go to your local rehab and have a gander at a nice abscess or what happens when they accidentally hit an artery

It is bizarre, and I can see why you're offended by it; I would be too - I am a bit anyway.

When I saw this on DD I thought this is going to transform the way some people live; not just hangover cures but it'll progress to a whole diet thing so you a) don't have to spend time and money preparing food and eating it, and b) you get a balanced diet which will keep you at your optimum weight without effort.

That may be far fetched, perhaps I've read too much sci fi!

I remember an episode of Tomorrow's World way back in the 70s where they asked if people might one day just live on food pills (like the astronaut food of the time) and it was said that you had to do the chewing bit of eating in order for your digestive system to work properly o something, so you had to live on actual food and actually eat it.

I'm kind of pissed off that there will be people who can just bypass their hangovers. You SHOULD get hangovers! They tell you something about your body which you do need to know and to consider.

Surely if they are at risk of being dehydrated they should be on fluids? If they're coming into hospital they must be in a really bad way. Do you actually refuse to rehydrate your patients or were you joking?

I really don’t think the nursing team are going to risk misconduct proceedings over a teen who has been bought up to think to ok to get slaughtered.

I blame the parents though, I saw a woman giving a toddler in nappies fruit flavoured cider out of a bottle in the grounds of Dartmouth castle while telling her friends “I think if you make it normal they won’t be so curious” who nodded approvingly 🙄🤦🏻‍♀️.

If you don’t drink too much you won’t get a hangover. We’ve always been utter fuckwits with alcohol in this country, even in Tudor times foreign visitors were writing home saying we all drank too much.

@user1471565182

Iv injection is entirely different to something like botox. Go to your local rehab and have a gander at a nice abscess or what happens when they accidentally hit an artery

I was answering a question about legality. It’s legal, but obviously unethical because the risks outweigh any benefits.

Unless they count creating very expensive high-vitamin content urine as being a benefit....

[quote Toddlerteaplease]@fuckfuckingcovid19 no. Not joking. They Will drink when they wake up. But if they wake up with no hangover, they'll do it again. If they are actually severely dehydrated then obviously they'd get fluid. But they usually aren't. [/quote]
Well arent you nice? So you make the moral judgement that they are to be punished then? I've met a few nurses like you over the years. What a nasty piece of work.