[ELI5] Why is there, or is there, a need to wait 6 hours between medication?
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There‘s no general need to wait 6 hours or any specific general number.
If you are referring to OTC painkillers like ibuprofen or paracetamol/acetaminophen:
Drugs get absorbed through your gut and reach the required blood levels. They then get metabolized by the body, which in most cases breaks them down into inert molecules that get pushed out through your poop and urine.
How fast this happens depends mostly on the drug itself (and various other factors like how healthy you are, whether your kidney, liver etc work well)
For ibuprofen and paracetamol it is about 6 hours before enough of the drug is metabolized to lose its effect.
If you were to take your second dose mich earlier, you‘d just increase your blood levels to potentially toxic amounts, with no gains because both of them have a maximum pain killing effect that won‘t get better with taking more. You‘ll just get more side effects.
Same for many other drugs, like regular panicking V. 3 doses a day, spread apart by 8 hours, so you have a large enough amount running through your blood to kill bacteria throughout the day.
Instead of a massively high dose if you take all 3 at once; and then too low a dose after 8 hours.
Other drugs are metabolized slower, like many blood pressure medications (not related to their blood pressure effects, just incidental) so they can be taken once a day.
We can also formulate Tablets and capsules in specific ways, so the drug doesn‘t dissolve right when it touches the stomach, but is slowly released at a constant rate over a longer time, so you can take a higher doses Tablet once a day, and the drug is released over the next 24 hours.
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