You’re Taking Your Pills Wrong

An Easy Way to Make Them Kick in Faster

New research shows that two things dramatically affect how quickly pain pills, sleep aids, and other supplements go to work.

A Better Way To Take Pills Or Capsules

I suspect some people imagine the stomach as kind of like the vat of molten steel that killed the T-1000 in “Terminator 2,” only instead of a cyborg composed of liquid metal, you’ve got pieces of meatloaf, snow peas, and assorted organic compounds flailing around in the stomach as their life force leaves them, after which a piece of asparagus might, in a heroic act of self-sacrifice, lowers itself down into the same boiling cauldron.

Well, the stomach isn’t quite as inhospitable an environment as all that. Foods do get “dissolved,” but slowly and efficiently and without nearly the same cinematic splendor as the T-1000.

Partially dissolved foods are then methodically ejected through the pylorus – the valve at the bottom of the stomach– into the duodenum, where the nutrients start to be absorbed.

This process isn’t quite the same for pills, tablets, or capsules, though. Normally, the speed at which an encapsulated drug or supplement gets dissolved and put to work depends heavily on gastric motility (how much churning your stomach does), the physical properties of the pill or capsule, and how much food is already being processed by the stomach.

There’s something else that determines how fast a pill or supplement goes to work, too, and it’s something you have total control over.

Ordinarily, the speed at which a swallowed pill goes to work isn’t a big deal, but what if you’re taking a pain pill and you want it to kick in pronto, instead of an agonizing hour or two from now? What if you want a sleeping pill to take effect right away, instead of at 3 AM when the “King of Queens” reruns start?

It can be done, and it’s incredibly simple.

10 Minutes, 23 Minutes, Or 100 Minutes

Food – assuming you’re not a boa constrictor, python, or Joey Chestnut – is first chewed, then masticated and swallowed, whereupon it’s slowly transformed into chyme, a mixture of pulpy acidic fluid and food. It’s of course not the same for pills, tablets, or capsules. They drop down into the stomach like rocks dropped off the dock at Lake Okeechobee and sink to wherever gravity pulls them.

If, hypothetically, you’re leaning to the right, pills would “land” near the pylorus, which is on the right side of your asymmetrically shaped stomach. As such, they’d be absorbed and put to work rather quickly.

Alternately, if you’re leaning to the left, they would land on the opposite side of the stomach, which, in gastric terms, is miles away from the pylorus. In that case, drugs or supplements may take a long, long time to take effect.

You’re probably thinking, “Okay, fine, but who the hell leans one way or the other when taking

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