Why can’t pills be smaller ?

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Hello all, I was given Sprulina tablets as a health supplement to take. The recommendation is 3-9 per day and they’re 100% spriulina, 1 tablet is 1000mg. I’d say they’re on the relatively larger size of pill. So I was wondering can these be made smaller or is there a limitation?

E.G. Can it be produced that I’d only take 1 tablet vs 9 tablets per day? Like a super concentrated tablet.

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3 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

Pills with a few milligrams of active ingredient are often pretty small. Practically, you still want a pill to be big enough that it’s fairly easy to pick up between thumb and finger, as well as big enough to have a visible shape/color/markings. If a person with subpar vision has shuffled up medicines and is looking at two tiny round white pills, that’s an accident waiting to happen. Otherwise, though, small pills are easy to swallow, which is nice.

For some pills, though, there’s enough active ingredient that you simply can’t go small. A gram isn’t a lot in terms of weight, but it can make for a decent-sized tablet. For reference, a sugar cube is about 4 grams, and is much too big to easily swallow whole. Also, most pills aren’t just the pure substance, but also have a large volume of other binders and inactive stuff that lets it be a pill (most medicines wouldn’t just compress into a perfect hard tablet.)

In this case, a tablespoon of pure spirulina is only 7 grams. A tablespoon-sized lump of anything is already much too big to swallow whole. Your concentrated tablet would be what we affectionately call a “horse pill.”

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