Bit of context, I didn’t sleep very well because of allergies. I went to take some allergy medicine but realized my stomach is still heavy from the meal I ate last night, so it may not be the relief I am searching for. To my surprise, the allergy medicine started kicking in rather quickly (I can breathe again).
Does oral medicine bypass food in your stomach? Or does it dissolve and is more dense than the stomach acid and sinks to your liver more quickly? How can allergy medicine/anti-inflammatories/anything work as advertised on full stomachs?
In: Biology
We were taught that carbs will empty in 20 minutes. If you add fats, you are looking at an hour because the bile needs to be a part of the process. So basically if you take a pill with crackers and water it’ll get out of your stomach faster than if you had a glass of milk. The absorption occurs in the intestine. The blood stream that collects off the intestine then carries all the nutrients, meds, molecules to the liver. That is the portal vein. Then everything passes thru the liver and gets changed if need be. That is why when you are really sick and need antibiotics we give them right into say an arm vein because that vessel returns first to the vena cava (not the liver) and gets sent out to the body more or less full strength. And yes there are a few other places where absorption such as under the tongue i.e. instant glucose, nitroglycerin and some of the instant dissolving meds, also the nose had a bunch of fibers and the lungs have a mucous membrane that can sop stuff up. But most occurs from the intestinal villi not the stomach where the acid and bile mostly break everything into molecular pieces.
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