Medications
Trouble swallowing your medication? These tricks might help
Some simple techniques can make big pills go down more easily.
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If you have trouble swallowing a pill, you're in the majority. In a Harris survey conducted a few years ago, 51% of women said they had experienced difficulty swallowing tablets or capsules. "We often see people who can swallow food and liquid just fine, but have difficulty with pills," says Denise Ambrosi, director of the Speech-Language Pathology Department at Harvard-affiliated Spaulding Rehabilitation Hospital. Ambrosi notes that some people have physical issues that affect their ability to swallow, while others have an aversion to taking pills.
How swallowing can go awry
Helping the medicine go down
If pills present your only swallowing issues, there are a few things you can do to make swallowing medicine a little easier:
Tuck your head. The following may help even a large pill go down: Put the pill on your tongue. Take a sip of water and hold it in your mouth. Lower your chin to your chest. Swallow.
Disguise the pill. Put it in a food that can be swallowed without chewing, such as applesauce, yogurt, or a fruit or vegetable puree.
Modify the pill. Check with your pharmacist to see if the pill can be ground or broken into smaller pieces that can be mixed into food or more easily swallowed. If a pill is scored, it can probably be divided. However, coated, time-release, and combination medications are meant to be taken whole. So are capsules.
Try a different form. Talk to your doctor to see if you can take the medication (or a related one) in another form, such as a syrup, cream, injection, or infusion. For example, for women who have difficulty swallowing bisphosphonates like alendronate (Fosamax) and ibandronate (Boniva), zoledronate (Reclast, Zometa), is available as intravenous infusion.
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