The Weird Science Discovery That Makes Your Meds Start Working Faster

It was discovered that if a person is laying on their right side after popping a pill, it lands at the deepest part of the stomach and closest to the small intestine’s opening. Compared to standing upright, lying down on your right side actually speeds up the process of medicine dissolution and uptake by 2.3 times, according to the study. So, if your headache pill takes 10 minutes to dissolve and move into the small intestine while lying on the right side, it would take 23 minutes to get the job done if you take it while standing upright.

If you are lying on your left side, which was classified as the worst posture, the medicine dissolution pathway is the slowest and it happens 10 times slower compared to the right-leaning posture. It might also come as a surprise that standing upright and lying on one’s back turned out to be equally effective. The findings are of critical importance, especially for folks living with stomach ailments that slow down the process of medicine dissolution and absorption. 

The same goes for the elderly or people restricted to their beds with limited body movements. Stressing the importance of correct posture while ingesting medicines, the paper’s lead author Rajat Mittal notes that “posture itself has such a huge impact, it’s equivalent to somebody’s stomach having a very significant dysfunction(s) as far as pill dissolution is concerned.” The team is now planning to study the impact of body posture on food digestion.