Boost your energy levels, drop a dress size, cure your hangover, reverse the signs of ageing – these are just some of the claims being made for a new beauty treatment according to a promotion that dropped into my mailbox this month. Apparently it’s all the rage with the celebs: just by sitting for a couple of hours hooked up to a bag of intravenous vitamins, or by spending a few days with a tube up your nose being drip-fed a liquid diet, you can achieve your dreams of weight loss, increased energy and a younger look.
I have a penchant for custard creams, gin and late-night Netflix binges, so I’m up for anything that undoes the impact of my bad habits, especially if it involves minimal effort on my part. But as a parent of a child with intestinal failure, these so-called beauty treatments overstep the line – not just ethically, but also from a safety point of view.
My 11-year-old daughter has been hooked up to a bag of intravenous vitamins every night for the past seven years. The benefit to her? Life.
Daisy’s intestinal failure is caused by a combination of factors including enteric neuropathy, pan-enteric colitis and gastroparesis. The bottom line is that her gut is, and always will be, unfeedable. She cannot absorb and digest food, so she has to receive it all directly into her bloodstream. This system of infusing a carefully balanced mixture of vitamins and minerals is called total parenteral nutrition (TPN).
TPN is only used in the absolute worst-case scenario, when the body can no longer digest and absorb the vitamins and minerals it needs to survive. The risks are huge: our bodies are not supposed to receive nutrition this way, and as a result, many people who are TPN-dependent end up needing a liver transplant at some stage. And that’s the least of our problems. Daisy has a central line, a permanent catheter that is tunnelled into a main vein so that we can connect her bags of fluids to her bloodstream. She has had episodes of sepsis when bacteria have got into her blood stream via this line, and an air bubble in the line could cause a fatal aneurysm.
That is the risk that we, and the many other adults and children who rely on this form of nutrition, live with day-in, day-out. The TPN bags Daisy receives are compounded for her every two weeks, based on a prescription provided by the TPN pharmacist at Great Ormond Street. I take blood from her central line, and that is analysed to ascertain her precise nutritional requirements. For example, as she is chronically anaemic she has a huge amount of iron in the bag; she also has a lot of potassium and her B vitamins run low, so these need topping up. It’s a precise art, and as you can imagine, very expensive and time-consuming to make up the totally individualised bag of vitamins and minerals that will keep my daughter alive.
Not for Daisy this magic, fountain-of-youth elixir that the rich and famous are buying into. After seven years of TPN, she has been left with hair loss, a dysfunctional and inflamed liver, chronic anaemia, permanent fatigue and a chest criss-crossed with scars from the central lines that have become infected and septic and have needed pulling out and replacing.
When our bodies function properly, they absorb the vitamins and minerals needed for life. If this does not happen, then surely we should be visiting our GP, not a beauty clinic? The commercial practice of offering intravenous vitamin therapy is relatively new, so there are no randomised trials or research papers relating to their efficacy or the claims made by the companies offering them.
The British Nutrition Foundation says this on its website: “Vitamins and minerals are naturally found in food and are generally consumed alongside other nutrients in a food matrix. The matrix can influence the extent of the nutrients’ absorption, both positively and negatively. In a healthy individual, the digestion and absorption of food is finely regulated to release nutrients into the bloodstream from the gut and from the liver. If nutrients bypass this process and enter directly into the bloodstream in high doses, this could potentially cause harm and to date the medium- and long-term effects are unknown.”
One clinic I found online offers a one-day training course for doctors, nurses and dentists to learn how to administer the IV treatments; I had to undergo two weeks of intensive training before I was allowed to manage Daisy’s infusions at home. Not a single clinic that came up in my Google search offers an initial blood test to check the client’s existing vitamin levels, and all rely on patient word of mouth for previous relevant medical history. I wonder if the clients really understand what fluid overload can do to the heart, how an air embolism can kill you, or what too much vitamin A does to the liver?
There are some more sinister elements to this trend. In the US there are ongoing shortages of some intravenous vitamins and minerals for TPN patients, meaning people who depend on the infusions to live are missing out on vital nutrients. If shortages of drugs used in medical treatments exist, should they even be licensed for use as beauty treatments?
The culture of instant results and quick fixes may be clouding our judgment when it comes to using intravenous drips – these processes were developed to save lives in cases of confirmed nutritional need. If only life were as simple for my daughter, and the many other babies, children and adults in the UK like her who rely on intravenous feeding to live. I would love for Daisy to be able to eat, but it will never happen. Her intestinal failure is permanent, so TPN will always be part of our lives.
For my daughter, a vitamin infusion will never represent glowing skin, increased energy, or a jetlag fix: for us it will always represent the difference between life and death.
