Dehydration and Athletes
Nutritional and Fluid Replacement IVS can beneficial for athletes especially a certain subset of individual athletes, This has been well documented by Doctors Given and Diehl in their paper entitled “Intravenous Fluid use in Athletes which appeared in the sports medicine journal Sports Health. Although this study concludes basically that they would not recommend as a standard, IV therapy for pre or post treatment of Athletes it does not show harm. Their often cited paper is an extensive literature review of studies but of small populations, some as small as 4 people.
Vitamin Replenishment
There is a lot that can be said to criticize this type of study both for and against IV therapy. The fact is at this time there is no large population valid study that validates any recommendation completely. Common sense dictates that replacing fluids, vitamins and minerals lost will help athletes. As mentioned in their study they do say clearly that they believe “a subset of athletes can benefit”. The fact is we do not know who that subset may be, so since there is little harm and potentially a lot of benefit we make IV therapy available to all athletes.
Intravenous Fluid Use in Athletes
Gordon V. Givan, MD* and Jason J. Diehl, MD v.4(4); 2012 July
