Open three mobile IV websites in three tabs and you'll notice the same architecture every time: a grid of bags with aspirational one-word names — Revive. Glow. Executive. Immunity. Recovery. — each with a short poetic blurb, a price, and a list of ingredients written without a single number on it. It's a menu designed to be scanned, not audited. Here's the five-minute skill that flips that: how to read any drip menu the way the people who make them read each other's.
Step one: ignore the name entirely
Names are market positioning; formulas are product. "Executive" tells you who they're selling to, not what's in the bag — and two providers' identically-named drips can differ by an order of magnitude in actual contents. The name is the last thing to read and the first thing to discount. What matters is the next line down.
Step two: hunt for the doses
This is the whole exercise. Any menu can print "Vitamin C." Only an honest one prints how much. 500mg and 5,000mg wear the same two words and are not the same product — a tenfold difference hiding inside identical marketing copy, and the single biggest driver of the price gaps that confuse shoppers. Same for B12, magnesium, glutathione, NAD⁺ (where 250 vs 500 vs 1000mg is the entire conversation). Legitimate providers publish amounts or produce them instantly on request. A menu with no numbers anywhere isn't an oversight — it's a business model that depends on comparison being impossible.
"Vitamin C" is not a dose. It's a word. The dose is the product, and the menus that hide it are hiding it from exactly one person: you, holding a competitor's tab.
Step three: total the real price
Menus have arithmetic games, and four are near-universal: teaser base pricing — the $99 headline whose actual formula lives in paid add-ons, arriving at $220; upcharge stripping — glutathione or extra B12 sold à la carte on a bag whose price point should include it; travel fees revealed at checkout (ours don't exist inside the county — check whether theirs do); and mandatory gratuity stacked onto an already-quoted number. Compare delivered totals for equivalent formulas, never headline prices — the ranking frequently inverts once you do.
Step four: the three questions
Then ask, by phone or email — and time the responses: "What are the exact doses in this formula?" "Who designed your formulas — is there a named medical director?" "What's included versus extra, all in?" Fast, specific, unbothered answers indicate a real clinical operation. Deflection, "proprietary blend" language, or a discount code offered in place of an answer indicates one hoping you'd only ask once — which is also the vetting protocol's central finding: how a provider handles being checked is the information. Pair this with knowing what a bag normally contains and you can out-read most people selling them.
A menu you can audit
All-Inclusive $349
Full formulas, listed doses, no mystery blends — read ours against anyone's.
B-Complex · B12 · Vitamin C · Lipo+ (MIC) · Magnesium · Glutathione · Biotin · Zinc
The invitation
Run this on our menu — doses listed, formulas published, no travel fees in the county, no mystery blends — and then run it on everyone else's. That's not a rhetorical flourish; it's the actual business strategy. Transparent menus only lose comparisons to other transparent menus, and we'd rather compete there.
This article is for general education and is not medical advice. IV therapy at SurgIV is administered by registered nurses under physician-written protocols, with a health screening before your first visit. Talk to your doctor about what is right for you.
