If you are meant to chew aspirin when having a heart attack because it works faster, is there any reason you should just swallow regularly instead?
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Aspirin has a coating that allows it to dissolve slowly to avoid irritating you mouth or stomach during regular use. Chewing it gets into your bloodstream more quickly.
The reason to swallow regularly is the the pill will gradually dissolve slowly over time so that you get the effects to last over a longer period of time. In an emergency situation you want maximum effect “now” so you chew it breaking it up and exposing more surface area so it’s absorbed quicker.
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Yes. A possible side effect of Aspirin are minor hemorrhages (bleeding) in the stomach. Taking the tablet whole decreases that risk, especially if it has a stomach acid resistant coating. (Side note: the tablets with stomach resistant coating should be taken on an empty stomach, the ones with regular coating after eating some food.)
In an emergency, acting faster is more important than decreasing side effects. For head aches or daily use as a platelet aggregation inhibitor (“blood thinner”), saving a minute or two is usually not worth the risk.
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Aspirin is a rare, acidic medicinal compound. As such, it is one of the better tasting medicines, although not great. Ingredients can be added to improve it, too.
Most drugs are basic, and taste bitter. Many taste absolutely horrible. If patients were asked to chew Tylenol, it wouldn’t happen most of the time.
Chewing may decrease absorption time from 30 minutes to around 5-10. So, faster acting. Since drugs rarely have a dose interval shorter than 4 hours, the 20-25 min time savings of chewing has a negligible effect on the medicinal duration, as some have mentioned. 3.5 and 4 hours are the same, for orally administrated drugs.
In addition to the info provided in the other comments, there’s a lot of evidence (though not necessarily fully conclusive) that chewing aspirin significantly speeds tooth erosion, and may also not be very good for the gums, so not something you’d want to do regularly.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15354902/
If chewing aspirin makes it work faster, could you crush it and snort it for even quicker results?
Hard to fill a glass with water and swallow when it feels like a train is hitting your chest
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