Introduction

Parenteral administration of compounds usually labelled as dietary supplements for oral consumption is commonly known as “vitamin drips,” “vitamin cocktails,” or “vitamin injections.”¹ They are poorly investigated both in terms of efficacy and safety.^2,3 Nevertheless, vitamin drips are gaining attention as a novel branch of alternative medicine⁴ due to marketing campaigns and promotion of these services by celebrities.^1,5 To date, most of the reports on this emerging phenomenon were anecdotal and lacked scientific rigor.⁶

We aimed to cross‑sectionally investigate the experience of individuals using parenteral supplementation services in Poland.

Methods

The study’s design was approved by our university’s institutional review board (no. 227/20). Data were collected between February and May 2020.

To date, no professional term has established itself to describe vitamin drips. Here, we referred to these interventions as “parenteral supplementation.” Firstly, most of the ingredients used in intravenous blends are typical constituents of dietary supplements and their palette is not limited to vitamins. Secondly, the services promote their products as “supporting treatment.”^1,4,6 Finally, the companies underline that parenteral intake of vitamins and macro- or micronutrients offers unique advantages over the oral form.^4,6

We created an original survey to investigate the experience of people who had used parental supplementation services. We decided to develop a new questionnaire tailored for this purpose because this phenomenon had not been studied using such an approach before. We assumed that the results would be preliminary, and that further surveys with more sophisticated designs would follow. Initially, we screened 10 websites of services offering vitamin drips for various aspects that could be included in the questionnaire. The form contained questions on general characteristics, contact with medical professionals, and experience with the services. The initial version of the survey was prepared and used in Polish (Supplementary material, File S1); however, we also attach the English version (Supplementary material, File S2). The form contained mostly closed‑ended questions and did not assume standardized outcome measurement. We disseminated the link to the questionnaire in Google Forms via Facebook groups related to health or complementary medicine. We used the Polish zloty (PLN) to the euro (EUR) exchange rate from June 6, 2020. The dataset will be available on Mendeley after publication.

Results

We accessed a total of 70 Facebook groups, and the survey was accepted by administrators in 35 Facebook groups that include over 437 000 members. We obtained 32 answers, and of them, 17 (53.1%) were by individuals who used parenteral supplementation services in Poland. The essential results are presented in table 1, and all details can be found in Supplementary material, table S1 and S2. The respondents tend to have bad experience with physicians. The motivations and chosen supplements varied between the participants, but parenteral vitamin C was most common with over 75% of participants reporting its use. Interestingly, one respondent admitted that he / she used drips to test them, and also admitted to being a physician who was considering preparing infusions for his / her family and relatives (Supplementary material, table S2). The highest declared amount spent on parenteral supplementation was PLN 30 000 (EUR ~6579). Finally, in some cases, patients were not informed about the service in detail, and one respondent was persuaded to give up conventional treatment. None of the responders mentioned the use of nonintravenous supplements.