Your posture while taking medicine decides how it works on the body, says study

Did you know that your body posture can actually decide how better the medicine will work?

A recent study by researchers at John Hopkins University has found that the position of the body has a huge influence on how fast the medicine will be absorbed by the body.

The study was published in August in the journal Physics of Fluids.

The study says that if you are standing upright while taking medication, the pill lands to the end region of the stomach. Even when you take the medicine while lying down and leaning to the right, the pill also goes directly to the stomach and due to this, it dissolves very quickly.

However, the researchers have said that if you lie down and lean to the left, it does not dissolve quickly and can not be absorbed by the body.

The study found that taking pills while lying down and leaning to the right had a dissolution rate 2.3 times faster than an upright posture.

Explaining the duration a pill takes to dissolve, the researchers have said that if a pill takes 10 minutes to dissolve when taken in the right side, it will take 23 minutes to dissolve while standing upright and it will take 100 minutes to dissolve when taken lying on the left side.

“We were very surprised that posture had such an immense effect on the dissolution rate of a pill,” said senior author Rajat Mittal, a Johns Hopkins engineer and an expert in fluid dynamics. “I never thought about whether I was doing it right or wrong but now I’ll definitely think about it every time I take a pill.”

The model developed by the team, called StomachSim, appears to be one of the first to be able to conduct realistic simulation of the human stomach which mimics what is happening inside a stomach as it digests food, or in this case, medicine.

Majority of the pills work only after they are dissolved properly. Only after the content of the pills are released by the stomach to the intestine does a pill’s effect be seen in the body. “So the closer a pill lands to the lower part of the stomach, the antrum, the faster it starts to dissolve and empty its contents through the pylorus into the duodenum, the first part of the small intestine. If you’re aiming a pill for this part of the stomach, posture is critical to both gravity and the natural asymmetry of the stomach,” the researchers say.

This is a critical health care aspect for elderly people especially. Giving them medicines based on postures can save time as the medicine can work on them quickly.

“For elderly, sedentary or bedridden people, whether they’re turning to the left or to the right can have a huge impact,” Rajat Mittal said. “Posture itself has such a huge impact, it’s equivalent to somebody’s stomach having a very significant dysfunction as far as pill dissolution is concerned.”

A wrong posture can delay the impact of the medicine by an hour!