Sept. 16, 2022 – I want to tell you a story about forgetfulness and haste, and how the combination of the two can lead to frightening consequences. A few years ago, I was lying in bed about to turn out the light when I realized I’d forgotten to take “my pill.”
Like 161,000,000 other Americans, I was also a purchaser of a prescription. Medication. Conscientiously, I stood up and took the pill with me. Being lazy, I didn’t bother to grab a glass of water to help the thing go down. Instead, I quickly returned to bed and threw a pillow on top of my head. Then, I was ready for sleep.
I felt a burning sensation in my chest within seconds. The pain became unbearable after about one minute. I did not want to alarm my wife and went into the living-room where I spent the next 30 minute doubled over in agony. What was I doing? heart attack? I called my sister, a Texas hospitalist. I was advised to go to the emergency department to be checked out.
If only I’d known then about “Duke.” He could have told me how critical body posture is when people swallow pills.
Who’s Duke?
Computer scientists at the University of Texas created Duke, a computer representation (computer representation) of a 34-year old anatomically normal male human male. IT’IS FoundationThe, a non-profit group based in Switzerland that works in a range of health care technology projects. Using Duke, Rajat Mittal, PhD, a professor of medicine at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine in Baltimore, created a computer model called “StomachSim” to explore the process of digestion.
Their research was published in the journal Physics of Fluids, turned up several surprising findings about the dynamics of swallowing pills – the most common way medication is used worldwide.
Mittal said he chose the stomach to study because of the function of the other organ systems.
“As I was looking to initiate research in some new directions, the implications of stomach biomechanics on important conditions such as diabetes, obesity, and Gastroparesis became apparent to me,” he says. “It was clear that bioengineering research in this arena lags other more ‘sexy’ areas such as cardiovascular flows by at least 20 years, and there seemed to be a great opportunity to do impactful work.”
Your posture may help a pill work better
Several well-known things affect a pill’s ability to disperse its contents into the gut and be used by the body, such as the stomach’s contents (a heavy breakfast, a mix of liquids like juice, milk, and coffee) and the motion of the organ’s walls. But Mittal’s group learned that Duke’s posture also played a major role.
Researchers ran Duke through simulations using varying positions: leaning forward, backward, right or left. All other parts of their analyses, such as the ones mentioned above, were kept the same.
The researchers found that the position of a pill can influence how fast it disperses in the intestines. Leaning to the right was the most efficient. The least efficient position was to lean right. This prevents the pill from reaching bottom section of stomach. It also keeps any trace of the dissolved drug out of duodenum (where the stomach joins with the small intestine). It is a good idea to observe Passover for Jews. Recline to the leftAs a symbol for freedom and leisure, it is used during the meal.
That makes sense if you think about the stomach’s shape, which looks kind of like a bean, curving from the left to the right side of the body. Gravitation will alter the position of your body depending on where the pill lands.
Researchers concluded that posture could play a significant role in how pills dissolve. This is also true for gastroparesis which means the stomach has lost its ability to empty properly.
How this could help people
Among the groups most likely to benefit from such studies, Mittal says, are the elderly – who both take a lot of pills and are more prone to trouble swallowing because of age-related changes in their Esophagus – and the bedridden, who can’t easily shift their posture. These findings could lead to improvements in the ability of people to move. Treat people suffering from gastroparesisThis is a problem that can be especially problematic for diabetics.
Mittal says future studies will focus on how the GI system handles proteins, carbohydrates, and fatty foods.
In the meantime, Mittal offers the following advice: “Standing or sitting upright after taking a pill is fine. Take a pill on your side or back if you are required to lie down. Avoid lying on your left side after taking a pill.”
My condition wasn’t heart-related, as any gastroenterologist will tell you. I was probably suffering from a bout of Pill esophagitisThe irritation can be caused by medications that irritate or irritate the mucosa. Although painful, esophagitis isn’t life-threatening. The pain started to ease after about an hour. By the next morning, I was feeling fine with only a slight ache in the chest that brought back memories of my agony. (Researchers found an increase in the condition in the COVID-19 epidemic. This is the antibiotic doxycycline..)
To be exact, I’ll tell you where my pill problem began. As mentioned aboveThe stomach. Nothing in the Hopkins research suggests that the alignment of the esophagus plays a role in how drugs disperse in the gut – unless, of course, it prevents those pills from reaching the stomach in the first place.
