I’m the one they call Doctor Feelgood.
I’m gonna make you feel alright.
By teaching you how to swallow pills.
If you’re anything like my lovely and beautiful and talented wife, you probably have a very
hard time putting medication into your body because it’s borderline physically unbearable
for you to swallow pills.
It’s seriously a 5 minute journey of frustration and sadness even when my wife is ingesting
something as tiny as a tylenol.
And she’s not alone.
Studies suggest 1 in 3 people experience difficulty when tasked with swallowing oral medications
in pill and capsule form, which ultimately leads to many people skipping out on vital
doses of prescription medication because they simply don’t want to expose themselves to
the literal pain of popping pills.
That’s not good and that’s why researchers from the University of Heidelberg, in Germany,
rounded up 143 patients and subjected them to some pill swallowing tests.
They had them gulping down all sorts of shapes and sizes and they did so to try and identify
the best methods for getting the good stuff down the gullet.
And they found that there is a best way to swallow capsules and a different best way
to swallow tablets.
And each method directly correlates with the density of the pills compared to water.
So, let’s say you’re rocking some pretty gnarly allergies and you need to down an anti-histamine
capsule.
With capsules, the research team discovered that the “lean-forward” technique is the
most efficient and is 88% more effective than old-school methods.
Allow me to demonstrate.
You’ll need your drugs, I’m using a tic tac, and 20ml of water, which is somewheres
around a tablespoon.
You simply place the capsule on your tongue, take a sip of water, don’t swallow yet,
first, you lean forward by tilting your chin toward your chest, and then swallow.
(Do it) Yum.
Because the density of a capsule tends to be lower than water, your head position keeps
the little bugger from swimming around in your mouth before it’s journey down to tum
tum town.
Tablets tend to be more dense than water so a different technique is required to basically
help shoot the dang things down your throat.
It’s called the pop-bottle method.
So lets say you get your daily vitamins like the rest of us and you’re tasked with swallowing
a horse pill every single day.
You simply find a flexible pop-bottle like container, fill it with water, pop the horse
pill into your mouth, and then tightly wrap your lips around the opening of your bottle
like you’re giving it the good loving, and then without letting air seep into the bottle,
maintain firm lip-to-bottle contact and use a sucking motion to flush the tablet into
your body.
(Do it) If you’re doing it right, you should feel the bottle slightly collapse into itself.
Now, both these methods were tested against simply taking a sip of water and swallowing,
something that most people do I assume, and the patients pill-swallow rate greatly increased
when utilizing the pop-bottle and lean forward techniques.
So, if you’re one of the 1 in 3 plagued with an inability to swallow pills, give these
methods a shot.
They just might cure what ails you.
I’m Dr. Joe Bereta and I just insulted all the doctors of the world by calling myself
a doctor.
I’m sorry.
Hey, do you guys have any techniques that work for you, let us know in the comments
down below and be sure to subscribe for more DNews.