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November 19, 2014
A Hard Pill to Swallow? How to Make It a Little
Heidelberg, Germany—How should pharmacists counsel patients who struggle with swallowing their pills?
Easier to Take It’s a common complaint; previous research has indicated that more than half of people experience swallowing difficulties when taking tablets or capsules. Now, a research brief in the Annals of Family Medicine offers some techniques to make hard-to-swallow pills go down a bit more easily. “Among ambulatory patients who report difficulty in swallowing pills, 1 in 3 experience vomiting, gagging, choking, or having tablets blocked in the throat,” write the authors from the University of Heidelberg in Germany. “Therefore, the modification of dosage forms (58.8%) and non-adherence (9.4%) are frequent, and can worsen medical conditions and increase health care costs. Given that tablets and capsules differ markedly in physical properties such as size, shape, and density, optimal swallowing techniques likely differ, too.” In response, the researchers demonstrated that two specific swallowing techniques significantly improved the ease of swallowing tablets and capsules in patients with swallowing difficulties—and even those without. In the first technique, called the “pop-bottle method,” the tablet is placed in the mouth, the lips are tightly closed around the opening of a flexible plastic beverage bottle, and the tablet is swallowed in a swift suction movement to overcome the volitional phase of swallowing. The second method, called the “lean-forward technique,” had patients swallow capsules in the upright position with the head bent forward. For the study, researchers had 181 adults swallow 16 differently shaped placebos and rate their ease of swallowing. The two dosage forms rated most difficult were then swallowed testing the two techniques. The pop-bottle method was found to improve swallowing of tablets in 60% of patients, with the lean-forward technique working in 89%. “Both techniques were remarkably effective in participants with and without reported difficulties swallowing pills and should be recommended regularly,” the authors conclude. |
U.S. Pharmacist Social Connect
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