Full blown Kermit freakout in that last panel!
… Do y’all really have that much of a problem popping pills?
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
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
Yeah I’ve had daily meds since I was 6. I was confused when I first met people who couldn’t take pills
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.
Every day I’m amazed by the most mundane shit that Lemmings somehow struggle with
It’s surprisingly common considering how ubiquitous pills are, not just for the oddballs here
I certainly don’t. I can easily put five or ever more pills in my mouth at the same time and swallow them all with one sip of water. I’m not even sure how I do that. They just all kinda align and slide down.
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.
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.
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
It varies a lot from person to person. The only way I was able to learn to swallow pills at first was to deliberately swallow air, like you do if you want to make yourself burp. Head forward? Head back? Both interfered.
some pills have nasty taste if they touch your gums or mouth. fill in water first, then pill, then swallow.
Guess that just didn’t bother me, but yeah, which you do first didn’t make a difference in terms of swallowing. It’s all about tilting the chin down to open the throat.
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.
Good for you. Only reason to tilt the head back is to not spill. Closing the mouth fixes that. This is “pill taking recommendations”, not “re-thinking swallowing-in-general 101”
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.
And these goddamn pharma companies putting binders and shit in so you can’t medically boof em.
BTDT. Time-release is too useful though.
My only time-release capsule is filled with little beads, I just pop it open and eat the beads like pop rocks
O_O
(゜o゜;
I am intensely displeased with this comment. I don’t know why this got to me so much more than the other degenerate shit I’ve seen around, but this gave me a pretty violent physical reaction. Maybe it’s because I’ve been taking time release capsule meds for 15ish years now? Whatever the cause, you should be proud because that was well written.
I’m speaking my truth. XR Adderall, crack em open and pour em on me tongue. The caviar of stimulants
damn, you beat me to it. can confirm, it works like a charm
a lot of you here missed the point that this was how to get KIDS to swallow the pills. not you.
Same thing
LPT: Fill your mouth with water, hold your head back and open mouth. drop the pill in. close mouth and swallow the water.
you wont even feel the pill.
by throwing the pill into the water already in your mouth instead of putting itin your mouth and then drinking the water, the pill wont have a chance to stick to your tongue or gums and release its bitter/nasty taste.
Put pill in mouth, swallow pill. People hate this one weird trick!
I don’t like to do it, but sometimes I gotta take a pill and have no beverage.
Yeah! This is it. The amount of people who just put the pill in their mouth and THEN drink water surprises me. Every time I’ve done that with a specific type of pill, it would leave some extremely bitter powder on my tongue! Easily avoidable by putting water in first.
I misheard my mom and started putting them under my tongue as a kid then using the water to swish it down. Works relatively well
I feel like putting the pills in your mouth first works a bit better when you have a bunch of pills to take. I take four pills every morning (ADHD, antidepressant, allergy pill, and L-methylfolate because of dumb genes) and I’ve tried both ways. The pills-first approach is just faster and easier for me, and I don’t mind the taste. Hell, I weirdly like the taste of my ADHD meds 😅 I will absolutely do the water first thing when taking something disgusting though. I tend to close my mouth and tilt my head forward rather than back, however.
I don’t know why my client posted this comment 4 times… Sorry about that.
Lol. I hear ya, but I have taken like 6 pills at once using the water first method. That’s fair, to each their own!
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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.
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!
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.
It’s literally just taste for my partner.
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.
Yeah it’s wild how adding some pills to strawberry yogurt just makes for really really fucking bitter yogurt.
Yeah I learned how to dry swallow after almost that same incident cause I wasn’t ruining food I liked anymore
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.
Aren’t there slow-release pills that shouldn’t be crushed?
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.
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)
Yea I should have put an asterisk.
I’d go further and say you should ask a pharmacist about questions like these. Even better is to ask a compounding pharmacist, as a doctor or retail pharmacist might just recite the pharmacopeia to you while a compounding pharmacist will probably explain in more detail (likely as a play to offer their services lol).
There’s ER and other formulations you wouldn’t want to crush, it’s not just EC to avoid.
So it technically depends on the extended release formulation, so from a layman’s perspective, yes you should likely ask your doctor or even better ask a compounding pharmacist (as a general rule if you have questions about medication you’re better off asking a pharmacist rather than a doctor.)
Given that…
From a technical perspective the only definition of extended release is a lag phase after ingestion. This means there’s no immediately discernable difference between delayed release through anti-dissolution coating and slow dissolution through a hard-to-dissolve substance. (Even when you read something like two different pills saying delayed release vs extended release, there’s no legal difference and the FDA doesn’t give a fuck about the naming. This might be different in other countries so Americans benefit from other Country’s health systems in naming. I’m not sure.)
Coating-type pill formulations should not be crushed.
Suspension-type formulations actually can be crushed to a certain degree. Typically humans aren’t going at the pills like crazy in a mortar and pestle and don’t have the strength to separate the suspension properly so it’ll still have a slowed release effect. But yea if you smash them too hard then yea you can actually mess up the way that works.
Yes. Most ER/XR/CD/EC shouldn’t be. There’s some others that shouldn’t. Good to ask a pharmacist.
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.
This is because Mary Poppins lied to us. It isn’t a spoonful of sugar that makes the medicine go down, but something with a bit of salt in addition to that sugar. Salt masks bitterness.
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.
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.
Great for methylfenidaat…
Wait what? That works??
If they’ll hold the pill in their mouth… Mine will spit if it is even a tiny bit sour or bitter.
Serious question - since when do pills have taste?
Some prescriptions and a good chunk of supplements have a taste.
Yeah, my blood pressure meds are pressed tablets that start dissolving right away and are extremely bitter. Not antibiotics bitter (thank god!), but still extremely unpleasant.
The cheap Walmart ibuprofen tastes like chalk or you don’t immediately swallow it
My Adderall comes in 2 forms: overly sweet & the worst thing that’s ever been in my mouth
Capsules don’t, tho
Depakote is an absolute motherfucking horse pill and a really wild patient often ends up on 1.5g (which is THREE horsepills) or more and a patient that wild often doesn’t want the depakote so I’m stuck trying to convince someone who doesn’t want to stop feeling like Jesus and Superman’s love child into choking down these fucking golf balls (I’m exaggerating but the point is they’re the biggest pills I administer by a long shot) and they don’t even make injectable mood stabilizers so the courts can order backup injectables but they’re usually benzos or antpsychotics which can help but won’t really do enough and they can order it as a syrup which helps with cheeking but tastes nasty (but I do usually get a laugh asking if they want some salt and lime with it) and it’s just… ergsdhcktdfnaajkfdv
Anyway the nurse trick is to give it with a spoonful of something thick like applesauce, pudding, or yogurt. It can help with the taste but more importantly thicker substances are easier for your pharynx to control as part of the swallowing reflex (we actually have beverage thickener on most nursing units for this exact reason). You don’t even need to crush most pills (you’re not trying to hide it, you’re just giving the throat something easier to direct down the correct pipe) just plop them on top of the spoonful and you’ll be able to swallow them much easier.
when i was in icu for 10 weeks, i learned this trick:
put the whole load of pills in your mouth, no water needed. then swallow them.
i dont know how i do it, i dont know why i couldnt do it before, i dont know how to explain it.
but i definitly can swallow half a handfull of pills just like that.
i learned it because that whole routine with glass of water and one pill at a time just was a PITA, when you are in icu for a good reason.
Why would you do one pill at a time? Just put em all in and wash the pills down with a glass of water.
I can’t swallow pills without water. They get stuck in the back of my throat.
it was a trick learned out of nescessity ;-)
yeah, I think it worked because they gave me lots of fluids anyway, I never had a dry mouth or sore throat.
Does this work on human children, or just cats?
I don’t think it works on cats :(
You throw it in their mouths and rub under the lower mandible until it goes down. It’s not too hard, assuming your cat isn’t an asshole.
Im one of the lucky few where my cat just eats pills out of my hand like a treat. He is not smart enough to know the difference.
That’s a mighty big assumption
Was going to say the same thing.
I’m surprised by the amount of people in this thread having trouble taking pills. It’s not really something I’ve ever thought about or heard other people struggle with but hey there it is
It took me a long time to get over it. I’m still not the best at taking pills.
I suspect some people just naturally have a harder time than others with it.
I never tried that and, judging from the comments here, it’s probably not going to work if I need to swallow pills. I can remember having 3 incidents where that murderous piece of shit tried to go down the breathing hole
You’re trying too hard.
For me, it wasn’t about swallowing the pill, it was a psychological thing about not chewing. I’d just take a small bite of bread, banana, or other soft food, chew a few times, pop the pill in and then swallow the food with the pill.
I’d try putting in water first, holding it in, leaning your head back slightly, then putting in the pill and swallowing immediately
If that doesn’t work, you can try the food method that someone mentioned above
Why did she turn into Kermit?
Because there’s s muppet deep down inside each of us controlling our every movement and word. Geez, it’s like they never taught you basic biology in middle school.
My cat is the best in that regard: either he eats the pills straight or off my hand or I put it on the floor and put his favorite creamy treat on top
I just slip it in the corner of his mouth, right on top of his tongue. Then I give him his favorite treat, kibble fresh out of the bowl.
