Do you reach for a painkiller when you have a severe headache? Then it is best to lie on your right side when you take the pill. Your posture appears to influence how quickly your body absorbs the medicine.
If you take a painkiller in the wrong position, it may just take an hour longer to relieve your pain. This is apparent from recent research, in which a computer model simulates the absorption of medicines through the stomach.
Path of the Pill
Most pills you take don’t work until they have dissolved in the stomach. This releases the active agent and allows it to reach the intestines, says fluid scientist Rajat Mittal of the American Johns Hopkins University. In your intestines, the drug is absorbed into the body via the blood, where it can do its job.
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The closer a pill is to the lower part of the stomach, the faster it dissolves and reaches the intestines. Your posture, in combination with gravity, determines where a pill ends up after swallowing.
right side
The researchers simulated the pill’s path for four different postures: supine, right side, left side, and standing. It turns out that the pill immediately lands in the lower part of your stomach when swallowed lying on your right side. The medicine then dissolves more than twice as quickly as when you take the pill standing up. Lying on your back has been shown to produce similar results to standing.
The recording is slowest when you lie on your left side. Then the pill ends up in the top of your stomach. If a medicine takes ten minutes to dissolve when you lie on your right side, it takes 23 minutes standing or lying on your back and even more than a hundred minutes on your left side.
For the elderly and the sick who are bedridden, it can therefore make a big difference whether they turn to their right or left side when taking medication. For healthier people, standing is a good second choice. For example, if it is not convenient at the office to lie on your right side.
hearty meal
For their research, the scientists used a computer model called StomachSim, which mimics the human stomach as closely as possible. “It predicts the movement of fluid flow in the stomach and how food, or a pill, will be digested there,” Mittel says.
The researchers also looked at how pill absorption progresses in a stomach that functions poorly. This can occur, for example, in diabetes or Parkinson’s. These diseases have been shown to slow absorption almost as much as lying on your left side. So the position in which you take your medication seems almost as important as a healthy stomach for a painkiller to work quickly.
The findings have made Mittel more aware of his attitude when taking a pill. “I’m now also going to lie on my right side after a hearty supper,” he says. ‘The same principle also works for the digestion of food.’