There is a best body position to maximize the effectiveness of pills, Elizabeth Tracey reports

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You’ve probably heard that you should always sit upright when you take a pill for the quickest metabolism, right? Now results from a stomach modeling program called StomachSim, developed by Johns Hopkins engineer Rajat Mittal and colleagues, says there is a better way.

We were trying to figure out the degree to which posture can affect the way a pill dissolves in the stomach. The surprising thing was we did find that lying down on your right side actually speeds up the dissolution even more than being upright. We looked at upright, lying on our back, lying on the right hand side and lying on the left hand side. Being upright is very effective for the pill to dissolve, but lying down on the right is actually faster, and then lying down on the left hand side is really really bad for the speed at which the pill dissolves.  :33

Mittal says there are some oral medicines where it is important to sit upright, so always check with your doctor. At Johns Hopkins, I’m Elizabeth Tracey.