NAD+ Quezon City: The DIY Route

Every other page in this set has to argue the clinic route against the vial route, because in Makati, BGC and Ortigas both are sitting there in front of you. Quezon City is where that stops being true. The wellness-clinic scene here is thinner than Makati or BGC and pharmacy stock is more variable, which is a strange thing to say about a city that contains one of the most serious medical communities in the country.

It is not a contradiction so much as a mismatch. QC has hospitals, a huge teaching-medicine footprint and a university belt full of people who read primary literature for a living. What it has less of is the boutique longevity-clinic format, which follows corporate money and clusters in Salcedo and along High Street rather than around Diliman.

So a QC reader wanting a supervised infusion is usually looking at a trip to Makati or BGC and a session at USD 100 to 300 in a clinic or USD 150 to 350 at an international hospital, plus a metro crossing in each direction. Once travel is part of the purchase, the vial route stops being the cheap option and starts being the practical one.

QC readers skew younger, more price-sensitive and more research-literate than the rest of the metro, and the mail reflects it. Makati asks whether it can arrive today. Katipunan asks what the HPLC purity was on the batch, whether NMN oral precursors are worth bothering with, and how the CD38 problem interacts with dosing.

For the record on that middle question, since it comes up here more than anywhere: oral NMN and NR are precursors that have to be converted, and bioavailability is genuinely contested, with some research suggesting oral NMN gets degraded before reaching cells. The honest position is that we do not know how much oral precursors raise intracellular NAD+. Injectable material raises blood levels directly. That is the whole reason the injectable route exists.

The district also has more mixed housing than anywhere else in this set. Eastwood is condo towers with desks. Katipunan is a mix of low-rise, dorms and family homes. Diliman and the older subdivisions are houses behind gates with no desk at all. One district, three completely different handoffs, which is why a generic delivery instruction is useless here.

Quezon City is the largest city in the metro by land area and it is not close. That geography is a mild inconvenience for a lyophilized peptide with a wide tolerance and a real cost for NAD+, which degrades quickly at room temperature and rides in packaging rated for hours rather than a day.

The lever is the same one it always is, but it does more work here than in Mandaluyong or Makati: verification before noon so the run gets an afternoon rather than a rush-hour window. A QC order placed at four in the afternoon is asking an insulated box to cross the largest city in the metro during the worst part of the day.

The second half of cold-chain is the fortnight after delivery, and this is where the QC housing mix bites. Reconstituted NAD+ has to be refrigerated and used within two to three weeks, against the four to six weeks many other peptides tolerate. That window assumes a fridge that holds temperature reliably.

Two local realities to plan around. First, shared fridges in student and multi-occupancy households get opened constantly and the door shelf is the warmest place in the appliance, so a middle shelf toward the back is the right home for a vial. Second, if your area has a power interruption pattern, you already know it, and an overnight outage on a fridge leaves no evidence on a vial whatsoever. Neither of those failures is visible. That is the entire problem with this compound.

Against that, the at-home protocol: 100 to 200mg subcutaneously three to five times weekly for two to four weeks on loading, then 50 to 100mg one to three times weekly. Budget separately for bacteriostatic water and syringes, and do not economise on gauge, because subcutaneous NAD+ stings more than the short peptides you may be used to, purely because of molecule size. Diluting properly and injecting slowly is the fix.

District context, including the hospital and pharmacy picture, is in our Quezon City guide. The national purchasing comparison is in where to buy NAD+ in the Philippines.