People take medications expecting fast pain relief. If you’re swallowing pills, however, you might have to endure a longer wait.
Medications designed to work immediately don’t come in pill form. Take the epipen. Epipens are meant to stem severe allergic reactions, which can progress rapidly. The medication comes in the form of an injection, so someone entering anaphylactic shock can shoot the drug epinephrine directly into their bloodstream, leading to the fastest possible relief.
On the other hand, when you take a pill, the medication has to go through your esophagus and stomach, dissolve somewhere in your intestines, move through your intestinal wall into the bloodstream, get processed by the liver, and them move to the area where it’s needed. The process can take up to 20 minutes – and then you have to wait for the medication to actually start working.
It’s not an easy trip. The pill’s active ingredients have to survive the hostile conditions of the gastrointestinal tract before they can enter the bloodstream and get to work. In addition, organs like the liver and kidneys may filter some of the medication out of your body. The liver may also break down or change some of the compounds in the pill in a process called “first pass metabolism.”
Injections skip all those steps, but not everyone wants to give themselves shots. This is where sublingual medications, which are delivered under the tongue, come in. The membranes under the tongue readily absorb medications, which then enter the bloodstream without traveling through the gastrointestinal tract.
For example, Lipigesic M, an all-natural, nonprescription migraine medication, uses a sublingual delivery system to speed its active ingredient into the bloodstream, so it can quickly reduce the inflammation that causes migraine pain.
Fever few has been used to treat migraines for centuries, but most people take it as a daily supplement. In that form, it’s not always effective, because the digestion process leaves less fever few to be absorbed. In using a sublingual system, Lipigesic M uses a smaller amount of the active ingredient more effectively, allowing migraine sufferers to get back to their lives as soon as possible.
