What Is Dehydration?

Dehydration is when your body loses more water than you take in. Reasons that your body may lose a lot of water rapidly include:

  • Sweating due to excessive exercise or sun exposure
  • Vomiting or diarrhea
  • Medicines that have a diuretic effect, such as drugs for high blood pressure
  • Excessive alcohol consumption

Dehydration can range in severity from relatively mild to fatal. Typically, a person can go for three days without water before they die. The reason for this is that our bodies require water for many metabolic and cellular processes. Once we lose that water, these processes stop, and our bodies stop functioning.

 

Dehydration Therapy Treatment

Water is also a vital component in blood, so water loss can cause your blood pressure to drop significantly. Low blood pressure can lead to serious complications since your organs don’t receive the nutrients and fluids they need to function, making your heart work harder to compensate.

Another complication is that dehydration also causes a loss of essential electrolytes and salts that your body needs to function. That’s why many dehydration solutions contain several salts as well as plenty of water. Your body can’t produce these compounds itself and needs to get them from an external source, like food.

Luckily, combating dehydration is relatively simple and requires that you replace the fluids and electrolytes that you’ve lost. In many slight cases of dehydration, drinking water is enough. However, severe dehydration will need specialized IV treatment that involves replenishing your fluids with an IV drip.

Knowing how much water you should consume daily can be a challenge. Some of the recommended values are around 15 cups of water per day for men and 11 cups for women. However, these are just estimates and will vary depending upon your fitness levels, exercise routine, diet, age, and whether you have any medical conditions.

What Are the Symptoms of Dehydration?

Typically, people suffering from dehydration will start experiencing mild symptoms that get worse as they become increasingly dehydrated. Some of the most common symptoms include:

  • Dry and dull skin: Mild, chronic dehydration can negatively impact the condition of your skin. If your skin is duller and less elastic than usual, you may need to rehydrate. One of the most common tests for dehydration is to pull up the skin on the top of your hand and release it. If it bounces back immediately, you’re well-hydrated. If it takes a while to sink back down, you may need some form of rehydration therapy.
  • Nausea: Nausea is a common symptom that many people don’t associate with dehydration. Severe nausea can result in vomiting, which leads to even more water loss and worse symptoms.
  • Dark urine: The less water you have in your system, the darker and more concentrated your urine will be. Some medications and supplements can change the color of your urine, so be aware that dark urine isn’t always an indicator of dehydration unless you experience other symptoms as well.
  • Fatigue: Mild dehydration may cause you to feel listless, tired, and demotivated.
  • Light-headedness and fainting: Dehydration may impact your blood pressure, which will result in feelings of dizziness, light-headedness, and even fainting.
  • Rapid pulse: One of the ways your body tries to compensate for falling blood pressure is to beat faster. A rapid pulse, especially combined with light-headedness or fainting spells, may be an indicator of severe dehydration.
  • Confusion: Once your blood pressure drops, your brain will stop receiving all the nutrients it needs to function, which can lead to brain fog, confusion, and disorientation.

Dehydration Treatments

Oral supplementation

Treatment for dehydration is all about restoring fluids and electrolytes to the body. In less severe cases, drinking an electrolyte solution is enough to restore your body’s water balance.

We don’t recommend drinking plain water as a dehydration treatment because it doesn’t contain the necessary electrolytes or salts your body needs to function. By drinking pure water, you decrease the concentration of salts and electrolytes, which may lead to other problems. Your body can’t make electrolytes but needs to get them through food, supplements, or beverages.

If you don’t have access to a ready-made electrolyte solution, you can use salty broths, diluted fruit juice, or crushed fruit mixed with water. Avoid drinks like tea, coffee, or alcoholic beverages, which have a diuretic effect that will result in your body losing more water.

Intravenous rehydration

Intravenous (IV) dehydration treatment for adults is the gold standard for severe dehydration when the person can’t ingest fluids. Since one of the main symptoms of dehydration is nausea, many people with severe dehydration can’t keep down fluids without bringing them back up, meaning that they need a more direct treatment.

IV treatment for dehydration involves delivering vital fluids through an IV line directly into the bloodstream. This direct route means that your body can quickly access the fluids and nutrients without having to wait for them to pass through your digestive tract.

Dehydration treatment IV drips take significantly shorter time to produce a therapeutic effect, and most treatments only take around 30 minutes to complete. If you’re living a busy lifestyle and often forget to drink, you may consider an IV dehydration treatment in Beverly Hills as a great option to clear mild symptoms and let you get back to your life.

Conclusion

IV treatment of dehydration offers several benefits to people with even mild dehydration. Dehydration can impact every aspect of your life, making you feel sluggish, tired, and unable to concentrate or focus on your work. Many of us lead a busy lifestyle during which it’s easy to forget to eat and drink, or we tend to overconsume alcohol, which also has a dehydrating effect.

As the premier dehydration therapy in Beverly Hills, Soma Plastics can help you get your body in peak condition in under an hour. We offer IV therapy with the specific blend of electrolytes, fluids, and salts that your body needs to thrive. Don’t let mild dehydration get in the way of living your best life—schedule a consultation with Soma Plastics today.

Schedule a consultation with Soma Plastics today to learn more.