Lie on the wrong side and you’ll wait 10 times as long to feel relief.
Whether it’s down to too much screen time or the result of the night before, a pounding headache calls for just one thing: pain relief.
Pills are quick and convenient to take, but you also need them to get working pronto.
So, the findings of recent research, led by Dr Jae Ho Lee of Johns Hopkins University’s Institute for Computational Medicine, will delight the over-worked and the over-boozed everywhere.
Dr Lee’s team developed a computational model that would allow them to investigate how biomechanical factors might affect how quickly a pill’s dissolved active ingredients entered the duodenum from the stomach.
The model simulated drug dissolution in the human stomach and focused on how the posture of the pain-ridden when taking their pill might affect their getting to feel human again.
While this isn’t the first research to investigate the biomechanics of drug dissolution, the fancy program let the team calculate and compare the emptying rate and the release of dissolved active ingredients into the duodenum with greater accuracy – and with some surprising results.
So let’s get to the business end of the research – what’s the best posture for dropping a tablet?
The team tested four options.
Taking pills while lying on the right side was by far the best, sending the meds rocketing into the deepest part of the stomach faster than a speeding kidney bean.
Lying on the left was the worst, with the pill’s active ingredient taking more than 10 times as long to ooze into the duodenum. That’s bad news for southpaw sleepers.
Lying flat and remaining upright pretty much tied, with both about 2.3 times slower than lying on the right.
The team doesn’t seem to have tested the headstand, but said punter with monster headache will unlikely be up for that anyway.
Dr Lee’s team reckons this is the first model to couple gastric biomechanics with pill movement and drug dissolution to quantify the active ingredient passing through the pylorus into the duodenum.
But there are significant benefits beyond just knowing how to get the most bang for your medical buck the morning after a night on the sauce.
“We were very surprised that posture had such an immense effect on the dissolution rate of a pill,” said the team’s senior author, Professor Rajat Mittal, a Johns Hopkins engineer and fluid dynamics expert.
“And for elderly, sedentary or bedridden people, whether they’re turning to left or to the right can have a huge impact.”
If you’ve over-imbibed, expect penny@medicalrepublic.com.au to give you a good talking to.
