A new health/wellness trend, at least in the US, has so-called “IV Bars” or lounges popping up in many cities. The offer intravenous infusions of vitamins, minerals, supplements but not any regulated drugs. There doesn’t seem to be an obvious way to tag them at the moment. healthcare=alternative seems like a possible option, but then we should probably also have a corresponding healthcare:specialty=* tag. What do people think?
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Sorry, I should have added a link to an exemplary business: https://hydrateivbar.com/
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Well that’s quite horrifying.
I would probably just go with healthcare=alternative + healthcare:specialty=Intravenous_therapy or a similar value. The healthcare=alternative should already indicate that this is not a regular medical treatment.
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What the actual fuck?
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What I thought - hopefully it’s one of these concepts born from a TikTok trend that will vanish within 6 months
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Alright, I updated the wiki page accordingly.
which wiki page got changed?
The healthcare specialty one: Key:healthcare:speciality - OpenStreetMap Wiki
Is it actually anything related to healthcare though?
Perhaps I should tag this place with ahealthcare:speciality=making_people_happier 
Another idea that came up in Slack was to use the beauty=* tagging scheme, as these businesses are sort of in the same industry as med spas (beauty=spa). But unlike med spas and day spas, they use needles and don’t claim to beautify.
At least no one is tagging them as a kind of bar, right?
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I think it’s blurry. My partner informed me yesterday that these businesses are commonly used by people after overconsuming alcohol. So after you’ve gone to “Doctor’s Orders,” you may want to consider a visit to an IV bar 
IV bars do employ licensed healthcare staff to put in the IV and for “medical clearance exams”. And we don’t really have a great “non-healthcare wellness” tagging scheme. The healthcare=alternative and healthcare:specialty=* sections on the wiki also have a number of disclaimers and cautionary notes.
Another related business type that comes to mind are oxygen bars.
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Yeah, beauty seems unintuitive to me. The recent proposal for beauty=* failed partly because it included massages, which are not really aimed at aesthetics.
it is more related to healthcare than homeopathy, “curing” cancer with vitamin C infusions and so on
To me it seems putting it in the beauty corner is fine, what are botox injection places tagged like?
I’ve tagged Botox clinics with both healthcare:speciality=* and beauty=*, but that’s because those clinics are all about beauty and sometimes offer other beauty-related services too. Some pain clinics do off-label Botox injections too, as a painkiller, but I wouldn’t tag a pain clinic as a kind of beauty parlor.
Based on @hobbesvsboyle’s explanation, the IV bars are about some concept of “wellness”, which is about all we can say about many of the things that go in healthcare=alternative. I wouldn’t complain loudly if someone feels the need to surround the key in quotation marks.
My main hesitation with having the healthcare:specialty=intravenous_therapy is that there are also “real health care” infusion centers, like for administering chemotherapy, and so you need to parse the main healthcare=* to distinguish between the two. I don’t know how frequently the “real” IV therapy places exist as independent facilities rather than as part of a larger clinic or hospital.
Some specialties could potentially pertain to both healthcare=alternative and healthcare≠alternative. It isn’t ideal, but that’s more of an issue with the broader tagging scheme, which doesn’t use alternative=* to iteratively refine healthcare=alternative.
By the way, this discussion is really proving the lie to the assumption that Westerners have the evidence-based medical system…
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I think marking this as healthcare is a bit of a stretch. Yes, it can help fix sore heads, but so can walking to the corner shop and getting an over-the-counter analgesic.
A friend is a soldier. Before deployment, the army wanted them all to have enhanced first aid training, which included training on how to insert an IV.
So any of them with a hangover would get an IV drip with saline and glucose. 
Yeah, but one could argue that it’s more healthcare-like than trying to fix your sore head with globuli Anyways, I personally would also like to use a different main tag, but IMHO all existing alternatives are worse.
healthcare=* is often paired with amenity=* for backwards compatibility, but you could coin a novel amenity=* value to better describe the facility outside of any broader scheme. Would “IV bar” be the usual term for these things?