Just swallowed 2 Nyquil and they were unpleasantly large to swallow. Got me wondering.
In: Biology
Ever wonder why there’s inactive ingredients?
You can only get so precise when measuring or dispensing anything. There’s a margin of error.
This example isn’t going to be even close to normal manufacturing tolerances but you’ll get the general idea… You have a scale that can do milligrams. For uh… Jewelry ;).
Now, you need to measure out 1 milligram. Not 1.1. Not 0.9. What are you to do?
What if… You were to put in 9 parts of something inactive for every 1 part active? Then, you could measure out 10mg. And now you’re within your acceptable tolerance.
The smaller the active dose of a medication, the less of a tolerance there is to over- or under- measuring. So that ratio is going to be much higher… And for professional manufacturers of medications, they aren’t talking about 1mg and not 1.1 or 0.9, they’re concerned about 1mg and not 1.001 or 0.999. They want 1.000. To make that happen, they’re going to be looking at hundreds or potentially thousands of parts of inactive to one part active.
(It’s a very similar, but slightly different, problem when they need to ensure that the random particles of active medication are evenly distributed from pill to pill.)
There are two major issues the “shell” of the pill is meant to deal with.
First, surviving digestion. Your stomach has acid, and that could ruin the medication, and the actual absorption part happens in your intestines. The pill is designed to survive that acid, or at least make sure that the actual medication is released at the right time as it goes through you.
Second, dosage over time. If you want a pill that provides 24 hour relief, you need to release the actual medication slowly over those 24 hours, roughly. If it all goes into you at once, you get a spike of the medication and it wears off as your body uses it and cleans it up. The pill may provide a slow release so that you get a more even dose of medication over those hours.
Some pills are mostly active ingredient. Motrin, Tylenol, etc. are all active ingredient plus a little coating.
Other pills have a small amount of active ingredient, and a buffer to help the chemical not get broken down in the stomach.
Nyquil has about 350 mg of active ingredients. That’s most of the pill. The total pill is a little over 500 mg. The rest is some that make up the coating and some for appearance purposes. Small amounts help to stabilize the drugs against break down. At the end of the day, a smaller Nyquil pill just means you need to take more.
Drugs with 10mg of active drug are generally smaller pills. They have some “useless” ingredients that serve as binders to hold the pill together. However these pills rarely are larger than 100 mg total. They’re much smaller than the Nyquil. Big pills are typically transporting lots of drug.
Non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs aren’t exactly tiny dosages. It’s pretty normal for one pill to have 500mg of NSAID which isn’t any tiny amount.
There are a few things at play. First, you don’t want the pill to be so small that it doesn’t have marking identifiers or is difficult to handle. The second is that most pills are a slow release of some kind. The materials in the pill are required to slow the raye at which your body absorbs the drug so it lasts longer.
I used to work in a pharmaceutical compounding lab many years ago. Other things that go into the “excipients” (other stuff besides active ingredients) include “gluidants”, to help the powder flow through a shoot in the capsule filling machine. Surfactants to stop charged power from sticking to metal parts. “Lubricating agents”, “binding” agents to help tablets stick together etc.
I don’t remember all the details, but it was much easier to make a batch of a few capsules by hand, than to figure out a repeatable automated manufacturing process.
Then we would have to test the formulation at every step of the way to prove the right amount of drug was being delivered. Then also later test the capsule or tablet for durability, dissolving, stability at different temperatures. The boss had a phd in all this stuff. There is a lot that goes into it.
medications are not always mostly fillers . Large pills are mostly drug in fact. That’s why they’re so large.
Ask yourself why a manufacturer would make a pill that was mostly junk and then also make that pill oversized??
I believe they also make dangerous pills large to make it harder / more uncomfortable to swallow lots of them.
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