For Kara Roach, investing in your health means living the best life that you can in the body that you have. As owner of The DRIPBaR in Westbrook’s Rock Row, she’s introducing Mainers to intravenous therapy in the form of lifestyle and health support drips that efficiently supply the body with various vitamins and nutrients. “IV drips bypass your digestive system and enter directly into the bloodstream with nearly 100% bioavailability, compared to an average of just 30% with oral supplementation,” explains Kara, meaning that IV support provides the body’s cells with fuel quicker and more effectively than oral vitamins.
Though drips are by no means curative, they can act as functional medicine for healthy clients or supportive therapy for clients with chronic illnesses like cancer. Kara’s own father passed away from leukemia in 2017, and discovering how IV drips could have helped him throughout his diagnosis and chemotherapy is part of what motivated her to open The DRIPBaR Westbrook in the first place. “Recently, we had a client with an aggressive form of cancer come in who was so depleted that they could barely walk. By the end of the drip, our client was cracking jokes and giving their spouse a hard time,” Kara recalls. “We also see lots of laborers in the summer—roofers, painters, folks like that who come in dry and dehydrated—and I love helping our healthy clients stay that way. We’re not curing anything, but we’re trying to help people live the best life they can.”
Each of The DRIPBaR’s lifestyle and health support drips are made to order in a sterile environment and given to patients by a registered nurse. Kara likens the effects of drip therapy to the effects of working out: “You can’t go to the gym one time and reap the benefits of going three times a week for six months,” she laughs, adding that “keeping a cadence will help your body feel better.” Monthly memberships make it easy to maintain the benefits of IV therapy and replenish vitamins in the body once older cells have died off. “When people first visit, we recommend they come back in two or three weeks, and eventually it turns into monthly maintenance. People will come in towards the end of their month-long period and tell me that they can feel their energy waning or that their mood is dropping,” Kara notes.
The most popular lifestyle drips are designed to proactively boost energy, provide recovery, and support a healthy person’s immune system. The Restoration drip, for example, features vitamin C, magnesium, B-12, B-Complex, and glutathione (an inflammatory antioxidant) to accelerate rehydration, while the bestselling Post-Op drip includes amino acids, biotin, and zinc to help speed recovery. Health support drips, which are made for clients suffering chronic illnesses, can offset the side effects of chemotherapy, detox heavy metals from the body, or reduce neuropathy. DRIPBaR also offers IM shots, which provide a quick boost of support when clients don’t have time for a drip or are looking for additional support in between sessions.
The DRIPBaR Westbrook is a locally owned business, but both Kara and her clients benefit from the franchise’s network of physicians, pharmacists, and R&D scientists who are helping to develop new drips and recipes. “There’s a huge pool of medically focused individuals who are pushing this forward,” Kara says, “and we’re excited to share it with our community.”
To me, investing in your health means living the best life that you can in the body that you have.
