NHS doctors making extra cash with £100 IV drips for tipsy festival goers

WHAT do you give a well-heeled festival fan who wakes up in a tent with a sore head after partying too hard?

An intravenous hangover cure costing £100, obviously.

The brainchild of six NHS doctors who call themselves the IV League, the idea was tried out at this month’s Secret Garden Party festival.

Usually the preserve of exclusive clinics for stars such as Cara Delevingne, the IV drips were sold in a tent to pump partygoers with revitalising minerals.

The IV League, which is run as a private medical firm, offered a menu including a ‘B12 Boost Shot’, an ‘Antioxidant Shot’, the ‘IV Athlete Shot’, a ‘Detox Immune Booster Drip’ and the ‘Hangover Drip’.

A bag of rehydrating saline called Hartmann’s solution was offered for £50.

For £75, the doctors added painkillers and ondansetron, an anti-nausea medication used for cancer patients. Pay £100, and they include vitamins B and C. The doctors normally work in Knightsbridge for the NHS, which lets clinicians run private practices in their own time.

Those having the drips had to sign a disclaimer listing risks such as allergic reactions and death.

But anaesthetist Dr William Buxton, who swapped his white coat for glittery gold leggings at the Secret Garden Party in Abbots Ripton, Cambridgeshire, said: ‘We’ve got a full emergency kit here, and you’re surrounded by doctors. It’s probably the safest place to be.’

One colleague admitted they give the drips to each other, adding: ‘It’s an old doctors’ trick. You go out for a heavy night and have a drip in the morning. We’ll be in at 8.30am getting one first.’ ÷ A music festival was called off yesterday after downpours made it unsafe.

Several acts at the Y Not Festival in Derbyshire had already been forced to cancel. Heavy rain and wind on Friday turned much of the site near Matlock to mud and stopped headliners The Vaccines from performing.

‘An old doctors’ trick’