M. Iqbal Syauqi explores Intravenous Treatment as a tangible cultural artefact that transforms abstract suffering into visible care.
Consider this everyday scenario in a clinical setting in Taiwan: a patient and their family arrive at the emergency room with some distressing complaints. After initial triage, health workers prioritise critical cases, often leaving those with non-urgent complaints waiting. Ideally, treatment is offered after clinical evaluation and laboratory results because health workers in clinical and hospital settings are trained to perform medical interventions based on clinical expertise or evidence of efficacy. In this biomedical framework, curing someone is often understood as administering medication for a specific health indication, with guidelines, devices, and drug prescriptions regarded as the domain of professional knowledge and skill.
However, in the Taiwanese and broader Chinese healthcare landscape, patients commonly request intravenous (IV) drips to relieve discomfort. Cultural beliefs play a central role in shaping this preference, often promoting misconceptions about IV infusions or injections, and reinforcing the perception that they provide rapid improvement (Zeng et al. 2019). Consequently, such requests may lead to treatments that extend beyond strictly clinical needs. In these moments, patients express that “being cured” involves “being cared for”, having their suffering acknowledged through a visible, technological intervention.
By framing IV treatment as a material culture that is situated in social and cultural life, and continually transformed across histories and everyday lives (Ingold 2012), this essay argues that IV drips are not solely ethical or clinical practices, but are deeply embedded in cultural discourses. IV treatment occupies fluid boundaries, functioning not only as a form of curing but also as a multifaceted dimension of caring. Drawing on Hardon and Sanabria’s (2017) insight that IV drugs are never merely pharmacological agents, situating IV administration within specific cultural contexts allows us to understand the broader discourses that shape how care is enacted, perceived and interpreted in particular communities.
Cultural Perceptions on IV Treatment
The use of IV treatments dates back to the cholera epidemic era, when intravenous saline solutions saved lives through rapid rehydration (Barsoum and Kleeman 2002). This historical efficacy helped shape a lasting public memory in Taiwan and broader Chinese societies, where Western biomedicine, especially injections, became associated with strength, potency, and reliable healing. Today, these preferences intersect with cultural values about the body and with demographic shifts: older adults in Taiwan frequently favour IV infusions, and families commonly request them in geriatric, palliative, and end‑of‑life settings as expressions of “proper” care (Ke et al. 2023). This preference aligns with broader patterns in Chinese societies, where IV therapy is regarded as a rapid means of restoring vitality. Furthermore, maintaining “bodily integrity” is paramount; procedures like nasogastric tube feeding are often perceived as intrusive or disfiguring.
These cultural expectations, however, meet the constraints of clinical practice. The use of IV treatments requires continuous monitoring by healthcare workers, increasing staff workload and costs, particularly in healthcare systems heavily dependent on insurance coverage. While patients may interpret IV treatments as acts of care and healing, health providers may view them (when not clinically necessary) as unnecessary overmedicalisation, raising ethical, financial and practical concerns. When encountering this situation, clinicians may face conflict between evidence-based practice and patients’ expectations of care, which is mediated by the IV treatments.
These tensions are further complicated by the growing use of IV therapies outside strictly clinical contexts, such as in the growing market for vitamin or nutritional infusions (Karasiewicz et al. 2024). The growing demand for IV treatment for health reassurance or symptomatic relief has led many private clinics and hospitals to commodify these services. Vitamin injections and drips are marketised as “wellness” and “nourishing” treatments, offered even to individuals who are otherwise healthy and fit. This commercialisation of IV drips reshapes the relationship between medical necessity and consumer desire. Patients (or clients, in this now commercialised space) may feel better after such treatments, as the perception of being cared for and “treated” affirms patients’ sense of wellness. Prescription of injections and infusions is therefore influenced not only by patient demand but also by prescribers who respond to, and participate in, this market-driven logic.
The normalisation of IV use outside clear clinial need further raises concerns of overmedicalisation and irrational prescribing, which can lead to serious consequences, including antimicrobial resistance, blood-transmitted diseases such as HIV or hepatitis B or C, and other adverse effects (Reeler, 2000). The underlying question emerging from these aforementioned narratives is: Why do patients continue to choose to be injected or infused despite these risks?
Efficacy as Contested Reality
When experiencing fatigue, loss of appetite, nausea, or frequent vomiting and diarrhoea, patients often seek IV therapy as a substitute for nutrition and hydration. Patients and their families may believe that being infused will restore and nourish them, even though they often lack understanding of the specific types or functions of fluids. They view infusion as an alternative to eating, saying, “I can’t eat; please give me an IV infusion to make me hydrated.” In this scenario, receiving fluids becomes a tangible act of nourishment.
IV drug administration can also symbolise authority and therapeutic action (Reeler 2000). When situated within culturally meaningful practices, patients perceive IV therapy as “something being done” for their illness, allowing advanced therapy to flow in their blood vessels and through their bodies. Reeler (2000, p. 136) describes injections as “the outstanding symbol of biomedicine”. When patients receive drugs intravenously, they project a rapid healing process, reinforcing their trust in biomedical approaches, even though the effectiveness of such therapy may be questionable or resource-consuming. The visible presence of the IV line makes the healing process real and affirms that they are being helped and cared for.
The above perceptions of IV therapy reveal how care is shaped by expectations, emotions, and cultural narratives surrounding illness. Cultural issues of care and treatment form two strains of debate: medical benefit and caring concerns. Although clinicians put broader consideration when deciding to administer IV fluid, patient and family try to involve what is important for them because the context of care renders them vulnerable (The et al. 2002). Patients and families know that insertion causes pain and discomfort, yet the authority and competence of clinicians frame the IV treatment as a necessary preference for the patient’s care interests (Larsen et al. 2017). Thus, even when patients are aware of discomfort and potential harms, the cultural, emotional, and symbolic meanings attached to IV therapy make it a compelling and reassuring form of care.
IV therapy may serve dual functions: as a biomedical intervention and as part of a culture of healing. This understanding challenges us to move beyond strict binaries of cure and care. For many patients, the IV treatment transforms their abstract and subjective experience of illness into something tangible. In emergency settings, patients feel cared for when doctors or nurses administer injections or infusions, even when actual curing treatment, initiated after assessment, has not yet begun. Here, IV therapy became a gesture of healing and a symbolic message of support within what is considered care. While there are risks and costs associated with unnecessary infusions, we must also acknowledge their significance in patients’ moral and cultural understanding of care.
To conclude, the desire for IV drip administration represents a culturally embedded expression of care beyond the biomedical framework. When viewed as material culture, including the catheter, the fluids, and the pharmaceutical substances themselves, IV treatments illustrate how medical materials possess a kind of fluid agency within practices of caring and curing that extend beyond strictly biomedical rationales. They also intersect with “historical bodies”, as IV treatments evoke imaginaries of advanced nourishments being delivered into the bloodstream. These imaginaries vary across individuals and societies, shaped by local understandings of health, vitality, and medicine.
As Kleinman (1980) reminds us, understanding medical practice and illness experiences and responses in society requires a deep examination of “particular cultural environments”, even the care itself always involves technologies that demand experience, expertise and specific skills that may be adapted and improved (Mol et al., 2010). IV drips become meaningful in care practices when patients advocate for what they perceive as improvement, comfort, or attentiveness. In this sense, culture of care often transcends rigid biomedical frameworks and public health interests. Even if not clinically essential, patients and their families may ask and advocate for IV treatment because it offers them a meaningful form of care.
About the Author
M. Iqbal Syauqi (he/him) is a master’s student at Graduate Institute of Medical Humanities, Taipei Medical University, Taiwan. An Indonesian general practitioner who has interest in culture of care practice theory, and STS in medicine.
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