WHEN YOU TAKE A PILL, DO YOU THINK ABOUT your body position? Engineers recently evaluated the optimal position for absorption. Today’s topic? How to take a pill, according to science.
A new Johns Hopkins University (USA) study reports that your posture can greatly affect how fast your body absorbs medicine. The “wrong” posture might delay the absorption of your medicine by as much as an hour.
What do you think they found is the best?
A. Standing upright
B. Lying on the right side
C. Lying on the left side
D. On your back
Let’s look at the results of the first model to simulate the drug breakdown mechanics in a human stomach.
Pill absorption — Posture matters
The Hopkins engineering team created a model (StomachSim), the first to be able to conduct a realistic simulation of the human stomach. Combining physics with biomechanics and fluid mechanics, StomachSim recreates what happens in you as it digests food or medicine.
Most pills do not begin to work until your stomach ejects its contents into the small intestine. Suppose the pill lands close to the lower aspect of the stomach (the antrum). In that case, the medicine will dissolve more quickly and exit the stomach through the pylorus into the duodenum (the first section of the small intestines).
Here’s where posture and fluid dynamics come into play. If you want to aim a pill for this lower part of the stomach, you need to get your posture right and take advantage of both gravity and natural stomach asymmetry.
The team examined four postures. The winner? Lying on the right side sent pills into the stomach’s farthest reaches. The pills dissolved 2.3-times faster than if one took the pills in an upright posture. Lying on the left side yielded the worst results.
Here are the calculated comparison times if a pill took 10 minutes to dissolve with the model lying on the right side:
- Lying on the right side: 10 minutes
- Upright posture or on your back: 23 minutes
- Lying on the left side: 100 minutes
The Johns Hopkins researchers wondered what the impact of improving position while taking pills would be for someone with suboptimal stomach functioning. What if we are bedridden or have stomach movement problems because of diabetes or Parkinson’s disease?
It is nice to know that being upright appeared to be a reasonable position. I suspect we are much less likely to choke, too.
I don’t know that there is anything actionable (except for not taking pills while lying on our left side). Still, I wanted to highlight how knowledge of fluid dynamics can change our thinking about basic health care maneuvers such as taking a pill.
Thank you for joining me today at the fluid dynamics of taking a pill.
