What an IV menu doesn’t tell you

Book an IV drip in Miami and the first thing you notice is what's missing. The price.

Across the providers we index, most don't publish one. Nationally we visited 1,554 recovery and vitality websites, and 28 percent listed a price for anything at all. The rest ask you to call, book a consult, or walk in. For a cash service with no insurance code to hide behind, that's an odd habit. The number exists. You just don't get it until you're in the chair.

When a menu does show up, read the names carefully, because they're doing marketing, not chemistry. The most common drip in the country is still the Myers Cocktail, a real formula that's been around for decades. After that the menus turn to mood: "immunity," "energy boost," "glow," "recovery," "skinny." Those are the clinic's own product names. They are not ingredient lists, and the ingredients behind the same name change from one clinic to the next.

The prices don't track the promise either. Across the menus we read, a drip called "immunity" runs about $210 at the median. "Energy boost" runs $119. Same idea, half the price, and no way to tell from the name what accounts for the gap. The name tells you what people walk in asking for. The price tells you what the market thinks that ask is worth.

Then there are the add-ons, which is where a $150 drip quietly becomes a $400 one. Glutathione, extra B12, a vitamin push, a bigger bag. NAD+ is the extreme case, an economy of its own: in Miami the median NAD+ session is $700, and published prices for services carrying those same three letters run from under $300 to nearly $1,000, partly because dose sizes differ and the menu rarely says by how much.

Memberships change the math again. A single Miami drip sits around $200. A monthly membership runs a median of $149. Going once, the per-visit price is the number that matters. Going three times a month, the membership is a different question, and the terms, how many drips, which ones, whether add-ons count, are usually the part the website doesn't spell out.

So here is what's worth asking before you book, none of which most menus answer on their own:

• What does this specific drip cost, with the add-ons you're actually considering?
• What's in it, by ingredient, not by product name?
• Who places the line, and is there a licensed clinician on site?
• If it's a membership, how many visits, which drips, and what rolls over?

We're not going to tell you which drip to get or what any of it does for you. That's between you, the provider, and your own doctor. What we can tell you is that the menu in front of you is built to be read a certain way, and the useful questions are the ones it leaves out.