The liquid capsules are made out of gelatin. This is soluble in water, so will dissolve in your mouth or in your stomach.
The liquid inside will contain little to no water so that it can’t dissolve the gelatin from the inside.
A similar principle are the liquid tablet’s you put into your washing machine to wash clothes. These are made of a water soluble ‘plastic’ but the liquid inside has very low water content. If you leave them in a humid environment for too long, they will eventually fail.
The outside coating of a pill is made up of different stuff on the inside. Inside is the actual medicine, but the hard membrane that covers the pill gets dissolved in your stomach acid when you digest it. The chemicals then get processed the same way regular food does, which is why many pills ask to be taken with meals so they can be processed better.
There are a lot of different reasons! It is tailored to exactly where they need the drug to be released. The medicine inside might be a powder or a liquid.
If it’s a liquid, then the inner liquid may be oily, and the shell only dissolves in watery liquids. Or it can have multiple layers. Sometimes you want it to dissolve in acidic conditions, so the drug is released into your stomach, and sometimes they want it to resist the acid and go into your intestines, where it will dissolve in alkaline conditions. How recently you’ve eaten food also affects the pH along your gut, which will affect how fast the medicine is activated or absorbed.
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