No. Mouth full of drink as if going to gargle. Tilt head back, open mouth, drop in pill(s), IMMEDIATELY swallow, AND chase with more drink.
Dear god, its like some people want to taste our crimes against nature.
Someone already said it, but tilting your chin down opens your throat, while tilting your head back will constrict
Tucking your chin down while swallowing pills is best
… and I already replied to them. Enjoy spilling drink and pills everywhere.
I’ve been taking 6+ pills a day for years and still can’t get myself to swallow them. I just chew everything. Tasty painkillers and caffeine.
My only time-release capsule is filled with little beads, I just pop it open and eat the beads like pop rocks
Tilting your head down can actually help with swallowing by a lot.
Insert pill. Put liquid in mouth. Tilt chin down. Swallow.
Source: have dysphagia, can only swallow pills and other hard substances by tilting head down
At least close your mouth first, unless you like spilling drink+pills everywhere.
Pretty sure tilting the head down is implied in my personal swallowing process. I’m not sure I can actually swallow anything with my chin up.
Tilt head back, open mouth, drop in pill(s), IMMEDIATELY swallow
Definitely not implied. I thought your entire point was keeping the head tilted back.
some pills have nasty taste if they touch your gums or mouth. fill in water first, then pill, then swallow.
Am I the only one who hates jokes where the entire setup is “These kids I chose to have sure are a pain in the ass!”
can’t even get my adult partner to take pills normally. It’s soo ridiculous the hoops a person would go through to avoid a slight bitter taste.
I’m a 34 y/o man and I need tricks to swallow pills. It has nothing to do with taste at all, it’s about capability. I actually have a condition that makes it difficult to swallow.
For me it’s the size. Can not really trick my body to just swallow. „But that’s huge! We have to chomp on it to break it down! Trying to kill yourself by choking?“
For normal pills I don’t even need water for pills. I just swallow. My partner always makes me drink it afterward cause you are supposed to.
But those monster size ones! I’m like wtf why not make it 2 smaller one jerks!
If they’re the hard pills, you can just cut them in half or even quarters if they’re big enough.
Should I schedule my press conference?
Depends on the type of pill. Something easily desolvable like melatonin will dissolve in my throat of I don’t take it with water.
Now that’s a bitter taste that comes back up
It may depend quite a bit on the pill. As an adult I can easily dry swallow things like ibuprofen. But I’m not sure about something like oral steroids.
I was prescribed them as a kid due to a particularly bad poison ivy reaction. I couldn’t swallow pills at the time, so after running through all the tricks to teach someone, we ended up grinding them up and sticking them in ice cream. It was something like 15 years before I could eat cookies and cream again without tasting steroids. Grinding them definitely exacerbated the problem, but I’m not sure how I’d fare if prescribed the same pills again.
It’s soo ridiculous the hoops a person would go through to avoid a slight bitter taste.
I figured out a fix for the avoidance of horrible tasting medicine:
The simplest and easiest way to use it is with an ice cube or two. Get the pill/liquid medicine you have to get down your throat ready, your ice cubes, a cup of water and stand in front of a sink. Put the ice in your mouth and let it sit on your tongue for 15 to 60 seconds. Yes, its going to be cold and slightly uncomfortable. The longer you can stand it the better your result. After this time has passed with the ice in your mouth your tongue will be numb. Spit out the ice in the sink, you’ll have 5-15 seconds where you can’t taste a goddamn thing which is plenty of time. At this point you could put the most disgusting flavored thing (sour, bitter, etc) and you won’t be able to taste it. Quickly get the medicine in your mouth and chug that full glass of water. Taste will start to return within about 3 or 5 seconds of chugging water, so make sure you drink enough to clear your mouth of whatever bad flavor you’re trying to avoid.
This whole process adds perhaps 2 minutes tops to taking medicine. For those that have difficulty this is a tiny fraction of time usually spent avoiding taking it, or the recovery process for taking it normally.
If you need more incentive (especially for kids) instead of using ice cubes and spitting that out. You can use ice cream or milk shakes and just swallow those. Same rules apply: put the ice cream in your mouth and let it sit on your tongue as long as its frozen. Its a little more involved than ice cubes because you might have to have two or three spoonfuls to get your tongue numb.
An Interesting strategy. I will see if your idea works better. Cause putting it In pudding does not work.
My partner opens mouth wide almost dislocating jaw and carefully puts pill at back of mouth and then immediately drinks something favored to wash off taste. Its like the conehead dentist scene wide. I’m scared choking is going to happen eventually.
Former pharmacy tech here, 8 years compounding pharmacy.
Get a mortar and pestle, crush it up and put it in whatever.
If not then use yogurt or something gooey.
By the way if anyone’s curious yes you can crush up Viagra, put it in Vaseline, and use it as a cream.
Yes you can put it there, and yes it’s effective.
I’ve done it multiple times for people that would regularly go over that five hour limit, because skin absorption is slower and weaker than intestinal absorption.
As a kid the bitterness of the crushed pill made me gag, even when mixed in something sweet like jam. Maybe my folks just needed to dilute it more with like an entire bowl of ice cream or something but I remember throwing up more than once because of the disgusting taste.
meanwhile I chewed grapefruit and pomelo peels after eating the juice part, chewed whatever pills were given to me, chewed single coffee beans, other weird shit. I don’t have the addiction any more after hitting my head a few more times.
toothpase though… somehow all of it fucks me up to varying degrees. I have settled on two that give me heartburn even if im super careful not to swallow any. the rest make me throw up or feel really not good.
Only EC(Enteric Coated) pills and capsule interiors cause they protect the pill against stomach acid until it reaches the intestine.
If it’s got a shiny exterior like an Advil it’s Enteric coated. If it’s a capsule with EC granules you’re gonna have a hard time crushing it anyway.
You’re probably not going to have a problem with those though because Enteric coating is super sweet and capsules are usually neutral in flavor, so there’s not much reason to try and hide the bitterness. For everything else there’s no real functional difference between a smashed pill and a whole pill in your stomach.
Edit: You should definitely consult with a pharmacist or even better a compounding pharmacist about this if you’re not sure what kind of pill you’re looking at, though.
There’s ER and other formulations you wouldn’t want to crush, it’s not just EC to avoid.
I would suggest you [the reader] ask your doctor before actually doing this, just so you don’t accidentally overdose someone (especially kids, who are more sensitive to dosage)
(I am not a doctor)
… Do y’all really have that much of a problem popping pills?
Every day I’m amazed by the most mundane shit that Lemmings somehow struggle with
This thread has me questioning my propensity for empathy. I never for a minute imagined, outside of folks with medical issues, that it was a problem. This has me interested. If I were a scientist and not just some guy, I’d study it.
As a kid, I had difficulty, as kids tend to. One day, as others have mentioned, it clicked, and sometimes I have several pills in there at once; e.g., Mucinex 12h, two Sudafed, two ibuprofen is a common combination on the rare occasion I’m sick.
As a kid, I recall practicing on Kraft Deluxe Mac n cheese, swallowing without chewing, and I think, from there, it just kind of developed. So load up on Kraft Deluxe, folks, cheese up that esophagus.
As a kid? Yes. I have a very strong gag reflex. The doctor using a tongue depressor would make me retch. I had trouble swallowing meat if it was tough or fatty. I would have to chew it for a very long time before I could swallow it. Fatty bacon I usually just had to give up and spit out.
It took me until I was a teenager until I could swallow a pill. I practiced on swallowing blueberries.
Now I have no problems, I can swallow a handful of pills and I’m a vegetarian.
I’ve always had a very sensitive gag reflex, to the point it’s difficult to clean my tongue while brushing.
Never in my life had issues swallowing pills. Absolutely no idea how I got one without the other
It took me until my 20s before I could swallow pills without gagging and spitting out water.
Then one day something just clicked and since then, no problem.
I can do one, two or even eight at a time like it’s nothing.
When I got married and had a kid, I discovered “trouble swalling pills” is indeed a phenomenon.
I have been taking pills since I was five thanks to my temperature-based allergy. I just salivate when I see a pill. It’s quite inconvenient when I am handling my child or spouse’s medicine.
The only temperature-based allergy I know of is cold urticaria and I’m unaware of medication for it, but word love to know if that’s not the case.
Yup, and it’s just regular antihistamines. I took seldane for a while until they took that off the market, then it was on to reactine. It was a bit of a slap in the face when the reactine became non-prescription, and therefore somehow not medically necessary according to my insurance provider.
I mean yeah, I also had an aversion to swallowing pills when I hadn’t done it before. But I got used to it pretty quickly, using this method specifically. I just assumed everybody did it like this
I’m more confused about how rolling a kid up in a blanket would improve the situation of them not being able to swallow a pill. I can understand how getting them to take something chewable or a liquid that tastes like shit would be difficult but swallowing a pill? You literally just put it in your mouth and swallow a drink of water, you can’t even tell it’s there really… I was ecstatic when I got old enough for them to stop giving me chewable medicine. I still can’t eat applesauce because of my grandma mixing some antibiotic I had to take with it when I was 7.