What are the benefits of IV Hydration Therapy Treatment? Celebrity mental health expert Dr. Flowers and his lovely Co-Host Robin French have a conversation with co-founder of Bounce Hydration who shares how drip therapy can improve your health and wellness, and you don’t need to go to a hospital for treatment. Tune in as we talk to James Johnson!
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Listen to the podcast here
Surprising Benefits Of IV Drip Therapy With James Johnson [Episode 45]
Welcome to Understanding the Human Condition with your host, Dr. James Flowers.
We’ve had a good time preparing for this. We have an exciting guest. I’m Dr. Flowers. Welcome, everybody.
I’m Robin French, your co-host, your Ed McMahon.
You’re a beautiful Ed McMahon.
That’s sweet. Thank you. We’ve got James Johnson, and he’s the co-founder of Bounce Hydration, and he has the tools to make you feel like a million bucks using IV drip therapy. Plenty of celebrities swear by it, and we want to talk a little bit more about that, how you’ll live your best life by a few drips a month, right?
We will. Thank you all so much for having me. I appreciate it.
You bet. Glad you’re here, because we get to get hooked up.
You do?
You’re not?
No, I’m not. You’re on your own.
That’s fine.
We’re going to do it live here on the air so that all of you can see that it doesn’t hurt, and it’s really easy, and it’s mobile. You can do it in your office. You can do it in your home.
That’s right, we’re 100% mobile, so we come to you.
I love that.
No having to go into the store or into a clinic or anything like that. They literally come to our 23rd-floor suite and hook us up and work with our patients, and we try to have all of our patients do this, and they love it.
They do.
Super excited about this.
Great idea.
What do you have?
We have the Dr. Flower special.
There you go.
Flower power.
One of the things that I totally believe in with this is high-dose vitamin C, which we always give Dr. Flowers. It’s really good for not just immunity, but also for your skin, for all kinds of organ functions and things like that. That’s the main part of it. We have a bunch of B vitamins, and we’re going to give him some magnesium just to relax him.
He’s had a tough week. Tough month, really.
We’ve had a tough month with high acuity patients this month.
We really do.
Even all of your personal hours are being spent on these patients, too. You’re putting in long days.
12- and 15-hour days this week, which is crazy.
You need some super juice.
Super juice. Energy, but relaxation.
We were talking about this yesterday. Ideally, if you can do two of these a month, it’s the best, right?
Definitely, yeah. Everybody has their own lifestyle, which also plays a large part in it. If you have high stress, like Dr. Flowers here, or maybe just like to be on the go and like to be on top of your game all the time, a couple times a month is really good for you.
Let’s do it so we can talk it up.
We can talk through it while we get hooked up here.
I have tons of questions, too, because this was fairly new to me. I just learned about this when I started working for you a year ago.
Today.
Today’s my anniversary.
That is so cool. Happy anniversary.
Thank you.
I chased you for months. It took a long time to get you to say yes.
I can’t believe you said that on air. I love that.
I did. I chased you for months, you kept saying no.
Look at us. Now you’re like, you’re too close to me. Move over.
Truly, this IV bag, if you’re feeling run down, you’re tired, you’re fatigued, you have chronic pain, you have fibromyalgia, there are so many different conditions that this works for. There’s a lot of benefits to IV hydration. James, talk loudly, because the microphone’s right there. Tell us some of the benefits that you see and a little bit about you and your background.
Meet James Johnson
Me and my background, I’m an RN. I ran surgery centers. I’ve worked in surgery pretty much my whole RN life. I’ve always had a little bit of entrepreneurial spirit. Just realized that this opportunity was presenting itself in the world and in Houston, and got with a business friend. A friend of mine is my business partner. We came up with the idea to do IV hydration. There’s plenty of needs, and Houston definitely is ready for it. We’re definitely becoming more of a progressive society, for sure. Quick little poke for you.
It was easy, though.
We put a little bit of lidocaine on there to help numb them.
Did I flinch?
No, I don’t think you did at all. Talk us through it. You stuck that little needle in there, and you’re just going to hook up the juice.
We’re going to hook up the juice. We’re going to turn it on. Dr. Flowers is going to let it run naturally with him. We can slow it down if he wants us to. I’m going to put a little magnesium in there in just a second. What it’s going to do is just relax him. It’s a natural muscle relaxant. It’s great for your heart. It’s great for all kinds of conditions, immunity, everything. It’s really nice if you’re stressed out.
He even came to my house when I had that onset of bronchitis.
On a Sunday morning. We text him. He said, “I’ll be right there.” I love that.
He makes hotel runs. He makes house calls. He does pretty much anything. I absolutely always feel the benefits of this, and so do our patients. Tell us more about how did you get into this with your background? What made you say, “I think this would be a great opportunity for me to do IV hydration?”
Along with the business aspect of it, just thinking a cool little business to start, when my kids were young, I’m telling on myself here, they would get sick. I say 10, 11, 12, or whatever. I would just grab a bag of fluid and give them a bag of fluid at home and just try to let them naturally heal themselves with a little sniffle or whatever. If they didn’t heal themselves within a day or so, then I would take them to the doctor. Of course, we’d always consult with the doctor, but initially, a lot of times, you just kind of feel run down and you feel sick. You put some fluids in, you influence electrolytes, and you just pep up really quick. I’ve always done this in my life.
Along with myself, I have autoimmune disorder, ulcerative colitis, which has actually opened up the doors for my business, too. We’re helping a lot of people with autoimmune disorders. With that, you have a lot of inflammation in your gut, and it causes stress. It causes all kinds of problems, and you don’t absorb what you need to be absorbing. Your body can’t function at 100%, or even 90%, at a higher level. IVs immediately go straight into your bloodstream, and your body, your cells just soak it in right away. You’re using 100% of what you’re putting in. If you are not feeling well, and your gut is out of whack, you’re stressed out, your body is not absorbing what it needs to absorb. You’re not getting the nutrients you need to help heal yourself so you can mentally and physically get back to normal.
What about IBS?
It’s almost all the same because it’s basically an inflammatory problem. Just chronic illnesses in terms of heart disease, now autoimmune has surpassed heart disease as the number one illness in the U.S.
I believe that. We see so much of that in our patients every day.
It coincides with stress, anxiety, drug addiction, and things like that. I have clients that come to me, and I think we’ve talked about it a little bit before, people try to self-medicate and things like that. They come to me, and I always direct them to a physician, but they come to me and say, “I started doing drugs because I’m in pain all the time, and then my doctor quit prescribing to me, and this is where they’re at.” I always try to pass on the info to you guys and stuff. With that, there’s just a whole big web of issues with inflammation.
Another thing that we do with our patients is when they’re doing a detox program, and they’re detoxing from alcohol or we’re detoxing them from opiates or any other drug, quite frankly, we always have James come in and work with our patients during the detox program. James, talk a little bit about the benefits of using IV hydration during a detox.
Benefits Of IV Hydration
As you’re detoxing, number one, you get dehydrated. You’re already probably dehydrated so bad when you come in here. It’s just unreal. You can’t drink enough. You’re just not in the mental state to really focus on your health. What we do is we’ll come in, and we work with Dr. Flowers and the team, and we just say, what are we looking for? Are we looking at a nutrition deficit here? Are we looking at just using fluids and electrolytes?
With that collaboration, we’ll decide on maybe like a Meijer strip, which is the gold standard in our field, or we’ll boost the immune system if they’re sick from being so stressed out. Or, if they just need fluids and electrolytes, that’s what we’ll do. From that standpoint, I’ve seen them, once they start feeling better after a drip or two, you guys, I think, take over and just really have a chance for them to focus on what they need to do to get their health back to normal.
How soon do they do that? Once they check in for their private detox? Right away?
Yeah. In our concierge detox program, they can do it that night, the day they come in, or they can do it the next morning. There’s not really any standard protocol or medical procedure for it other than if they’re dehydrated and they need this, then certainly our medical director will order that, and James will come administer.
They really shouldn’t detox on their own, because it can be very uncomfortable. If they try it on their own, they can seizure, right?
Certainly.
The two most deadly detoxes are alcohol detox and benzodiazepine detox and can result in seizures and ultimately death. If you try to detox on your own, do it in a very safe, medically supervised way with the assistance of something like this. It just really eases the process and helps that patient progress through so that then they can do an evaluation and do some good treatment.
The two deadliest detoxes are alcohol detox and benzodiazepine detox.
NAD
Good. This is probably a really good segue to that NAD that I’ve been hearing about. Can you talk about that?
Sure. Something we’re bringing on slowly just because it’s a new line for us. It’s been around since the 1920s. NAD is basically a vitamin B3 derivative of niacin, and it works on the metabolic function of the cell. In the mitochondria, basically, it goes into the cell and converts into ATP, which is energy. Energy is the source of all health. If you do not have good energy going through, mental and physical, through your cells, everything, you are not going to get healthy. That’s the source. It basically just revitalizes the cell and allows the cell to become healthy again and let it do its job.
Energy is the source of all health. If you do not have good energy going through your cells, you are not going to get healthy.
What does NAD stand for?
I know you’re going to ask me.
I always have to look up too. The good thing is we have it right here, and you can look it up.
All the other things that these drips can do, it’s for chronic fatigue syndrome, low energy, weight loss, dehydration, colds, flu, jet lag, headaches, allergies, which I found interesting.
For sure. Autoimmune system basically attacking itself and just goes into overdrive. It creates an allergy of some sort. There are different allergies. I’m not an allergist, so I’m not going to get into all that, but basically, you can beat your allergies by figuring out what the source of the problem is, what you’re being exposed to. Sometimes it’s higher, low amounts. But so, nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide is NAD.
Do you have an anti-aging drip?
Basically, along with multiple antioxidants, such as glutathione, I think that from what I’ve seen, and what I feel actually, with us, NAD, that’s a great anti-aging drip as the NAD. Not only can we use it in drug detox, alcohol detox, but it’s also being used for in small injections too, for just anti-aging reversal and slowing down the process of wearing down your cells. Keep them revitalized. Along with glutathione too, it is really good for you.
I was telling James several weeks ago that there was a company out in San Diego that would produce NAD and sell it in a liquid form. You would take a little capful, I would take a capful of it every morning. This is when I was living in Austin for a couple of years, and the supplier, I’m not sure why, they didn’t make it, but they didn’t. I will tell you what, I have never slept better in my life. When I say energy, I don’t mean I was hyper energy. I just had enough energy to do anything, that healthy energy, that I needed to get done throughout the day.
The hours that we work in this, in the business that we work in, are odd, long hours, and it would always get me through the day. I felt refreshed. I felt younger. I felt energized, slept better. Weight control, it was amazing. And then I stopped, and I could feel the decline. It wasn’t a withdrawal decline. It was like, just over time, your 50-something-year-old body comes back and says, I’m tired. My knees hurt again. I’m tired from working fourteen hours. I’m super excited. I think we’re going to do a four-hour NAD IV infusion, which I think is going to be amazing. We’re going to try that and add that to what we’re doing, offer that with our patients and those that we work with.
Robin, can you see in Dr. Flowers’ face the stress just kind of going? You can feel the magnesium kicking in.
Can you?
Yeah. I’m calming down a little bit.
It feels great.
How long a bag typically takes?
Depending on what’s going on. If there are some health-related issues, most healthy people can do it in about 30 to 35 minutes. We do not push it. If there are some health-related issues, we slow it down, and we always work with the physicians here, especially J. Flowers, what’s going on with them, specific to the client. We can do it over an hour if we need to, 1 hour and 15 minutes. The drip we’re talking about, NAD, that takes quite a few hours. We’re going to do it over a 3-to-4-hour period.
Why does it take so long?
It causes vasodilation. It causes a flushing effect like niacin does. When people say, “I have a niacin allergy,” it’s not a true allergy. Basically, it’s a flushing effect from the vasodilation. It’s really uncomfortable if you do it too fast. You can get nauseated, so you do it over 3 or 4 hours. That’s very important. If anybody does NAD anywhere else, just let you know that, make sure you do it slow.
Are you going to be sleepy after that? What’s the fallout from that?
I’ve never felt sleepy. I’ve never done the four-hour drip. I’ve always done just that short, quick liquid form of it. I don’t think there’s going to be a sleepy effect. Maybe calmness.
You will calm down. It’ll calm you, but you’re not going to sleep. That night, they say you sleep really well. The next day is actually the best benefit of the drip. They say you wake up, and you’re clear as a bell. If you do the four-hour drip, they say that it lasts about two weeks. It’s really good.
The timing on that is good for you.
Super excited about that. What were you going to say?
I was just going to say, you have some NFL clients, don’t you? You do this for a lot of NFL players.
Yeah, professional athletes. Specifically, a lot of go-getters, like CEOs of companies and CFOs and people that are in high-stress situations. They’ve got to travel, and they’ve got to be on the game. We do a ton weekly with some of them. I’ll literally just walk in their office because we know them very well, and we already have their drip down. That’s one thing we do also, customize drips. I already have the drip ready. I’ll walk in while they’re having meetings with their lawyers and just hook them up, whatever fits their lifestyle. We do that.
Different IV Hydration Options
Walk the audience through some different options for IV hydration, different cocktails, you would say, like the Myers cocktail and energy.
The Myers is the gold standard, and everybody can get just fluids and electrolytes. Past that, what we did was we felt like we wanted to open up to the general public, like what we can do. We thought we’d do that through marketing. We created some drips such as the Gwyneth drip and the immunity warrior drip. The Gwyneth drip is our antioxidants, got high-dose vitamin C and glutathione, which is a major antioxidant. It’s really good for your liver and skin, and detox.
Also, our immunity warrior came about before COVID, actually, but we used it during COVID. Our clients saw great results with helping boost their immune system. That has high-dose vitamin C and zinc in it. We also have vitamin D we can go along with that too, injections. We have all kinds of options. We can make you energize, we can make you relax, we can just replenish whatever you need. If your doctor says you need magnesium, we can do magnesium or whatever, whatever the minerals you might need.
Is that something that doesn’t have to be prescribed then?
What we work on is just a wellness protocol. If your doctor prescribes you vitamin D and he wants X amount of units or whatever per month or whatever, and each injection, we can do that. We can follow that, and we just get it approved through our medical director. By the way, we do have a medical director, and there’s a stigma of what we do. Some people don’t believe that, but we actually do. You have to have a medical director in order to do what we do.
You don’t always get an RN, though, coming to give. A lot of other companies don’t necessarily have an RN administering the dose. I think it’s really cool that you do that.
We do. Everybody that administers IVs through us will be an RN or above. There are companies, from what I’m told, that don’t do that.
A male RN, ladies.
There you go. Love it.
That’s normal.
I love it. Fantastic.
Best And Worst Candidates
What are the best candidates for something like this, and what are the worst candidates for something like this?
I say everybody’s a candidate for this, with the exception of if you have congestive heart failure, you have some stuff with your kidneys going on and things like that. That’s not very safe for us to do. We send those people back to their doctor or to the emergency room if they need fluids. If you’re relatively healthy, the best candidates, honestly, are the autoimmune people and people that are highly stressed out. Stress is on the rise, and you don’t realize how dehydrated you get until you have a bag of fluid. You’re like, “Wow, I feel so much better.”
The best candidates are just people like that, just everyday people trying to keep up with their lifestyle or their work life. The worst clients really, a registered nurse can do an assessment at the time of the drip, and then we will turn away people and say, “You’re not a good candidate for us.” We’re more under the wellness rather than healthcare.
What would be some of the reasons you’d have to turn them away?
Congestive heart failure, any type of kidney disease. We divert to our medical director, but most of the time, we just go ahead and turn them away because they need to be under a different medical supervision.
How young can someone be? How young and how old?
Our company basically will take people that are, because there’s so many athletes, a 10- or 11-year-old. That’s around a hundred-plus, 105 pounds. As long as they compensate like an adult, we can do the assessment. We don’t just take them and say we’re going to do it. We come and talk to them. We assess them first. If we think it’s safe, and maybe they’re just run down from playing ball all summer, or maybe they just have a stomach bug and stuff like that, we can do those things. But that’s definitely highly scrutinized in terms of the way we do the assessment, and we refer to our medical director for that.
Nice. Very good.
I love that it’s concierge, it’s custom, everything that we do. That’s the beautiful thing. It’s super popular with our patients.
Our clients, we have such a great and trusting relationship. They’ll literally have an appointment at 1:00. They’ll have the door open, sitting on the couch. “Come on in.” Their arm’s already out, ready to go, like, “Hook me up. I’m just relaxing.” We just hook them up, “How are you?” and we’re good to go.
We’ve had that where you guys just went from office to office and you hooked us all up. The beautiful thing is you can keep working. I had it hooked up, and I was still doing calls and on the computer, and you just let it drip, just like you’re doing now.
I think it’s really a great asset to have this as part of a wellness program, part of your own wellness program. If you’re an athlete, if you’re a non-athlete who just needs to stay energized and feel a real positive energy and stay hydrated, I don’t drink enough water. I know that I just don’t drink enough water, and this helps. I need to drink more water, but this also helps.
IV hydration is really a great asset to have as part of a wellness program.
Hydration
That’s a good segue to what’s the difference between if I just drink a whole bunch of water and stay hydrated that way versus just a substitute?
To revert back, we were talking about it goes straight into your bloodstream. You’re getting a hundred percent of hydration, and your body is using your cells, using every ounce of fluid that we give you. If you drink water, if you’re young and healthy, you might be able to absorb 20% to 30% of what you’re actually drinking, and your body eliminates the rest. That’s just how your body works. It can only take in so much at one time, and if you’re a little bit older, you’re stressed out, maybe you have inflammation in your gut, you’re probably not even taking in 10% of what you actually drink.
You’re eliminating it, and your body’s not actually soaking it up. Your cells are not actually using it. That’s a large difference. The immediate result of hydration is why we do this. People are like, “I’ve got to go. I have a business meeting, and I’m run down,” or whatever. Maybe they had a late business dinner, and they had a couple of glasses of wine, which I don’t promote, but it happens. They’ll call us and they’ll say, “I’m just kind of run down.” Immediately, you feel better. That’s definitely the benefit to this for sure.
It is, absolutely. James, thank you so much for doing this with us. We appreciate you being a part of our practice and working with our patients every day. We love having you around.
Awesome.
Thank you for this. I’m looking forward, we’ll do a follow-up on the NAD because I would love to do an entire session podcast on what NAD is, the benefits of NAD, and how it can be part of an ongoing wellness approach.
Perfect. That’d be great.
Thank you very much.
Connect With Bounce Hydration
If folks want to learn more about you and what you do, or get an IV drip, how do they find you?
BounceHydration.com. That’s the easiest way. Just give us a call, and we’ll schedule you. If you specifically want me, you can ask specifically for me, and I’ll be there at the appointment, and we’ll talk about it and see what we can do for you.
Awesome. How long does it take them if they call for an appointment? How long to get in usually?
We’re getting busy. It’s sometimes hard to get in that day, but I do my best. Usually, within 24 hours. We do our best to get you in that day.
Pretty quickly.
This would be a really great gift for someone. This would be great for a company to give as a benefit to their employees.
For sure.
Corporate gift, things like that.
Someone special. Just set up a set of flowers, send us.
It’s your one-year anniversary. We’re going to buy you an IV. Thank you for being here for a year.
I need a drip.
That is so good. That’s perfect.
You’ve given me a few drips anyway.
I like saying, “I need a drip,” instead of, “I need a drink.”
That’s true.
I love it.
That’s a good tagline for you.
Thanks, everybody.
Thank you so much.
I want to remind everybody watching or listening to us there’s numerous platforms to find our podcast, YouTube, Apple Podcast, SoundCloud, Spotify, Stitcher, and iHeart Radio. Please share this episode on social media or with someone that you think it could help. We want to remind you, too, that a clear diagnosis is the key to the most effective treatment possible. Thank you, everyone.
Thank you so much.
Take care.
