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IV Bags May Not Be Necessary to Rehydrate Patients

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Re: IV Bags May Not Be Necessary to Rehydrate Patients

#81
post #9

> You can also make good oral rehydration solutions yourself at home for pennies: Just take 32 ounces of water and add 6 teaspoons of sugar and a half-teaspoon of salt. > resist the temptation to drink at a normal rate... An ounce at a time every few minutes This should be something everyone learns. Many common headaches are just dehydration. When you've got a cold or flu, dehydration is common and makes you feel eve…

Some quick googling estimates 6 tsp of sugar is about 25 grams or 100 calories. For comparison, a 32oz bottle of Gatorade G2 (low calorie) has about 19 grams of sugar, and a 32oz bottle of normal Gatorade has about 56 grams.

Adding - 1/2 tsp of salt is 2.5 grams of which it is 1 gram of sodium. G2 - 435mg sodium, 120mg potassium; normal - 400mg, 100mg.

Re: IV Bags May Not Be Necessary to Rehydrate Patients

#82
Hospitals also insanely overcharge for IVs. A few years ago I was in the hospital, and I knew I could keep down oral re-hydration solution. The hospital put me on a saline IV anyway. When I got the bill, the IV line item was $2000! Insurance discounts brought that down to $200. I paid all that for a couple dollars of salt water I didn't need.

Re: IV Bags May Not Be Necessary to Rehydrate Patients

#83
post #67

With Vitamin Water and Raw Water, can a startup to market "Hangover Cure Water" or "Headache Water" be far behind?

A specific medical claim will trigger FDA requirements to prove efficacy in the US. Thats why you see lots of products not making claims, for instance — “High in antioxidants!”, some people will interpret that to mean improved health outcomes, but the manufacturer is not claiming it.

Re: IV Bags May Not Be Necessary to Rehydrate Patients

#84
post #30
post #9

> You can also make good oral rehydration solutions yourself at home for pennies: Just take 32 ounces of water and add 6 teaspoons of sugar and a half-teaspoon of salt. > resist the temptation to drink at a normal rate... An ounce at a time every few minutes This should be something everyone learns. Many common headaches are just dehydration. When you've got a cold or flu, dehydration is common and makes you feel eve…

is just salt enough? Or do we need to replenish any other minerals other than Na and Cl (K comes to mind)?

Potassium is also important, whatever mechanism you are losing Sodium (Sweat, urine, diarrhea, vomiting), there's a good chance you're losing Potassium too. Some ORS products also include Zinc because in the developing world it has been shown to reduce the duration and severity of acute and persistent diarrhea. Source: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11101480

Re: IV Bags May Not Be Necessary to Rehydrate Patients

#85
post #68

You can buy approved oral rehydration powder pretty cheaply [1]. I keep it around for backpacking trips and such. Also, I've heard, but have not verified, that coconut water is a decent approximation. I'm not sure if this is true, but it's certainly delicious.

I second this. Because it keeps forever and is relatively small, I keep it around in the medicine cabinet. If you've ever had a guest lose a fight with a Norovirus, you appreciate having some of it right at hand.

By the way, the Amazon product searches for this return a cesspool of magic woo. I recommend going to your local drug store, looking for the powdered Pedialyte, then looking in the meter-or-so surrounding that area for the cheaper store-brand version.

Re: IV Bags May Not Be Necessary to Rehydrate Patients

#86
post #3

> Better yet, we’ve learned since that you can still get most of the benefit without WHO-approved stockpiles of ORS. You can use a number of widely available commercial products that essentially replicate ORS, from sports drinks to Pedialyte. You can also make good oral rehydration solutions yourself at home for pennies: Just take 32 ounces of water and add 6 teaspoons of sugar and a half-teaspoon of salt. There are…

Disregarding the sweetness angle, what's interesting is that we perceive the saltier solutions as tastier when we are dehydrated. If you try drinking an ORS product when you're not dehydrated it will taste worse than when you are in that run down sweaty state on a hot day.

Re: IV Bags May Not Be Necessary to Rehydrate Patients

#87
post #60
post #9

> You can also make good oral rehydration solutions yourself at home for pennies: Just take 32 ounces of water and add 6 teaspoons of sugar and a half-teaspoon of salt. > resist the temptation to drink at a normal rate... An ounce at a time every few minutes This should be something everyone learns. Many common headaches are just dehydration. When you've got a cold or flu, dehydration is common and makes you feel eve…

Would drinking oral rehydration solution mixed with vodka prevent the hangover from occurring in the first place?

... I've done this.

At the start of my bachelor party (and possibly later on that night? It gets blurry) we brought workout hydration powder, the kind you use during and after a gym session. Drank a lot of it ideally to prevent or reduce hangovers.

I have no idea how much it helped, because I was still hungover the next day.

Re: IV Bags May Not Be Necessary to Rehydrate Patients

#88
I think the best place that this is illustrated is in the UFC. When they banned rehydrating through IV's (I read they test for it by checking for by products of rubber in the blood, which presumably would have come from running liquid through rubber tubes into the arm) we expected to see the entirety of the sport move up in weight classes. It was not a big secret that everyone was cutting large amounts of weight to gain an advantage on naturally smaller opponents. There wasn't a large scale shift in the fighter's weight classes though. They just swapped to oral rehydration.

One of the big concerns from this change though is that some doctors are claiming you don't rehydrate fully in a short period of time this way. Fighters weigh in the day before a fight, so they're peak dehydrated roughly 24 hours before they fight. There are claims that it takes the brain many days to fully rehydrate after a weight cut if you're not using IV's, so people paying attention in the sport are really worried that brain injuries are going to start going up.

Re: IV Bags May Not Be Necessary to Rehydrate Patients

#89
post #83
post #67

With Vitamin Water and Raw Water, can a startup to market "Hangover Cure Water" or "Headache Water" be far behind?

A specific medical claim will trigger FDA requirements to prove efficacy in the US. Thats why you see lots of products not making claims, for instance — “High in antioxidants!”, some people will interpret that to mean improved health outcomes, but the manufacturer is not claiming it.

Part of me wants to try to market some strong reducing agents as "high in antioxidants". Like carbon monoxide air fresheners, cyanide candy, hydrazine sport drinks, etc.

Re: IV Bags May Not Be Necessary to Rehydrate Patients

#90
post #88

I think the best place that this is illustrated is in the UFC. When they banned rehydrating through IV's (I read they test for it by checking for by products of rubber in the blood, which presumably would have come from running liquid through rubber tubes into the arm) we expected to see the entirety of the sport move up in weight classes. It was not a big secret that everyone was cutting large amounts of weight to g…

What would be a plausible mechanism for a faster brain rehydration using an IV? To me it seems that once the fluid is in the blood stream, it doesn't matter anymore which way it entered. It certainly doesn't take days for ingested fluids to reach the blood.
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