In this episode of the "Why Can't I Get Better? – Treatment Edition" series, Dr. Paul Anderson explains outpatient intravenous (IV) nutrient therapy, its purpose, and when it is appropriate. He describes IV therapy as a way to deliver nutrients directly into the bloodstream, bypassing the digestive system, to quickly replenish depleted stores or achieve concentrations that cannot be reached orally. The discussion covers why patients with chronic illnesses—such as cancer, long COVID, Lyme disease, post‑chemotherapy recovery, trauma, or severe malabsorption—may benefit from IV nutrients, especially when oral intake is insufficient or when higher doses are needed (e.g., magnesium for cardiac or musculoskeletal issues, high‑dose vitamin C for infections and cancer). Dr. Anderson outlines the typical work‑up (labs, medical history, medication review) and emphasizes that IV therapy is administered by a qualified practitioner, usually once or twice weekly, and is combined with oral supplementation and a nutrient‑dense diet. He lists the most common IV compounds: water‑soluble vitamins (especially vitamin C), minerals (magnesium, calcium), amino acids (taurine, carnitine, single‑amino blends), phospholipids (phosphatidylcholine), and NAD. The therapeutic goals include rapid cellular delivery, support of mitochondrial function, redox balance, and accelerated healing after surgery, trauma, or prolonged malnutrition. Dr. Anderson references his research and book Outside‑the‑Box Cancer Therapies and directs listeners to dranow.com for further resources.
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Welcome to Medicine Health with Dr. Paul Anderson. That's me, I'm Dr. Paul, and today we're in our series, Why Can't I Get Better? Treatment Edition. So today's series is about different sorts of interventional treatments, and the next one that we want to get into is intravenous nutrient therapy. So literally taking an IV set, so an IV bag usually, and tubing and IV cannula and then that goes into your veins. And if you've ever usually been to a hospital, you probably got an IV. It's possible if you got dehydrated somewhere you got an IV or maybe were in an accident. IVs are fairly common. This is a special use of intravenous nutrient therapy, which is an outpatient, normally an outpatient procedure. There are some hospitals and big clinics that I do consultation with where we use it in the hospital as well, but normally it's outpatient. And the goal is to take the particular nutrients in some sort of predetermined ratio of those nutrients, get them into your vascular system so that your cells have access to them. So you might say, well, why would I get an IV of some vitamin or mineral or amino acid? when I can eat it or I can take it as a supplement or something? And that's a very good question. You may not need an IV. Okay, so this is something that obviously you're not going to do this at home on your own normally. You're going to go to a practitioner. You should have a particular type of workup where they check your laboratory values and your medical history and medications you're on, all of that sort of stuff. But after all of that, Intravenous nutrient therapy outside of a hospital can be very, very useful because let's say, especially in the case of cancer, chronic illness, post-COVID, all of these things that are so difficult to manage sometimes, your body has gotten behind nutritionally. I would tell patients it's sort of like overdrawing your checking account. Now a lot of people don't use checks anymore, so it's— that's getting to be a little bit old as an analogy, but you get the idea. If you overspend what was in account, it's overdrawn and you go into the negative. Well, your body will do the same thing. Your body will generally not just up and die if you are nutrient deficient till you've been nutrient deficient a long time. It will just adjust its physiology so that you're chronically sick. So what we normally do with people is use intravenous nutrient therapy for a couple of reasons. One is in a person who's been chronically ill a long time and there's no way we're going to be able to feed them or have them take orally enough nutrients to get back up to level. And so we do oral things and intravenous things in concert, in combination. The next reason is sometimes there are nutrients that we want to put into your system at a higher concentration than you could ever eat orally without some sort of problem. 2 really good examples of this could be magnesium. Sometimes we will use magnesium in higher amounts. This is used in hospitals for particular problems, especially cardiac problems, et cetera. Sometimes outpatient, we will use magnesium maybe in higher amounts than you could ever absorb orally for traumas and musculoskeletal problems, muscle pain, et cetera. So it goes around your digestive. We're not eating it, so it's not going to cause— like magnesium in high dose can cause diarrhea and stomach upset. So this goes around. It goes in your vein and gets right your cells. The other one that's real common where we do that to get a higher concentration than you could ever eat is intravenous vitamin C, probably the most, I would say, famous of the intravenous treatments for infections and cancers and stuff. Most people have at least heard of intravenous vitamin C, and usually it's higher dose intravenous vitamin C. So another reason beyond the overdrawn nutrient issue is we might be therapeutically putting a nutrient in you at a higher level than you could ever eat or take as an oral supplement. And so why would we do that? We would do that to, number one, refill your body's stores of the nutrient, and number two, to get the higher concentration nutrient than we could ever eat to do a different physiological or biochemical activity in your body. So in the case of something like magnesium, if you're in the hospital and they give you intravenous magnesium 'cause you're having some sort of cardiac problem, they're trying to get that magnesium to your heart in a higher concentration and not wait for you to take magnesium pills to get it there. Well, it's kind of the same if you're outpatient. And let's say we have a vitamin mineral amino acid IV we're giving you and you've just been in an accident, you're traumatized, and maybe you have some muscle spasms et cetera, we might increase the concentration of the magnesium and some of the other things so that your muscles can get that right away. We don't have to wait for you to eat it. Now, people often ask with IV nutrient therapy, well, do you give people an oral version of the nutrients in between the IVs? And normally the answer is yes. Occasionally you don't do that for various reasons, which are a little bit more technical. But normally, if you're, let's say you're a chronically ill person or you've had a very bad bout with long COVID, or you, you have Lyme disease, or, or even you're recovering from chemotherapy and cancer, you're going to need a lot more nutrients than you could eat. So what we'll do is we'll set up an intravenous nutrient plan and prescription for you. It might be once or twice a week, and then we'll have you taking the majority of those nutrients orally in between, and then of course eating, you know, high-quality food, etc. So intravenous nutrient therapies are extremely beneficial in the cancer, chronic illness, and recovery setting. So they can take and they can get you from a stuck place to a place where your body has some of the nutritional armamentarium to operate the processes in your body that have been slowed down because of your chronic illness or your exposure to drugs or your exposure to your cancering process or long COVID or whatever it is. In people where, let's say, their digestive tract is so damaged that they're not absorbing very well, sometimes that's one exception of a time where we will take and give them intravenous nutrients repeatedly Until we kind of build up their nutrient levels, help to heal their digestive system and their other systems from the inside out, and then we'll start to change their oral supplementation because then they can tolerate it. So intravenous nutrient therapy can be very, very useful. The majority of things given through intravenous nutrient therapy are vitamins, mostly water-soluble vitamins. We do give a couple fat-solubles in rare instances, but water-soluble vitamins, and then minerals. So think of like magnesium and calcium, et cetera. And then amino acids. And the amino acids might be single amino acids, like a, something like taurine or— amino-like structure, carnitine, we use a lot, or an amino acid where we would give a blend such as would be used if you're in total parenteral nutrition, give a lower dose of the amino acid blend in the water-soluble IV to help you out. The next thing that would be useful with IV therapy would be specific IV therapies like high-dose intravenous vitamin C or moderate-dose intravenous vitamin C. On this channel, I've talked a lot about our research with IV vitamin C and cancer. That's in our book, Outside-the-Box Cancer Therapies, and we've written a lot about that. Also, intravenous vitamin C with COVID patients and post-COVID patients, we had discussions about that. There's now some publications that I've done other programs on that show intravenous vitamin C being helpful, especially during acute COVID. So I've used that a lot with our COVID patients and we've had a number of other stories and discussions around that as we've gone along too. Now sometimes there's other specialty things that you might do in an IV therapy. So another specialty thing would be a non-water-soluble IV such as a phospholipid IV. And that might be something like phosphatidylcholine. or PC sometimes they'll call it. There are other forms of phospholipids that are given depending on what country you're in. And sometimes there's other lipid therapies that are done in immune problems and in infertility and things of that nature as well. So again, the idea with IV nutrient therapy is not to replace what you're eating, And not to replace the supplements you might need to take or whatever else you're doing through a non-intravenous means. It is to override the digestive system so that the digestive process is taken out of the equation and we can put the nutrients right in. Now, very similar to when we had our discussion about hyperbaric oxygen, one of the places that benefits the most from this because you've got it going right into your bloodstream. Most of it's carried in the plasma component, the liquid component of the blood. Some is carried elsewhere. And then it gets out to your cells and it can be put into the cells rather quickly and feed the cellular processes. So that could be something like feeding the mitochondria. It could be feeding other cell processes. It could be helping to rebalance your oxidation reduction mechanisms. Especially we use this a lot in people who are coming off of surgeries and they need to heal up, or they're coming off of a physical trauma, they need to heal up, or they're coming off of long-term malnutrition and they need to heal up. Any number of things in that respect. Beyond intravenous vitamin C and magnesium, some of the other things— another one you may have heard of is NAD, nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide. NAD therapies are also given intravenously, and they're used in addiction medicine. They're used at lower doses to help with chronic fatigue and mitochondrial disorders, etc. And again, I will in the show notes put some links into some things you can read about intravenous nutrient therapy. And it is a wonderful addition to the care of somebody who has a chronic illness, cancer, long COVID, etc., etc. But we're out of time for this section. So it's Dr. Paul Anderson. Please like, share, subscribe, do all those things. And we're We're on all the pod burners. We're on YouTube. So any links you need, just go to dranow.com, dranow.com, and you'll find all the links there. And I'll see you for the next module. Thank you.
