I believe that you who have taken medicine must have wondered: how does the pill dissolve in the stomach? The cool animation below shows the process of disintegrating a pill in water. However, gastric juice is not only water, will it be different if it dissolves in gastric juice?
This is the ibuprofen soft capsule (Advil), after the outer soft capsule is melted, the liquid inside is dispersed around the water. I feel that the white appearance may be because ibuprofen itself is a substance that is slightly soluble in water, and the filling liquid in the soft capsule is dissolved in polyethylene glycol. Like hard capsules, the outer shell of soft capsules is mainly gelatin, but other ingredients are added to make it softer and more malleable. The main advantage of soft capsules is that a small amount of liquid medicine can be dispensed in the form of solid medicine, which is very convenient to take.
The change of ordinary tablets in water is generally called disintegration, which is that some of the components swell after absorbing water, allowing the tablet to disperse into small particles faster, promoting release of active ingredients.
Pills are generally formulated with disintegrants, such as starch. If no disintegrant is added, the surface area around the contact is small, and it would take a long time for a lump so compacted to dissolve.
Watch the full video~
This video doesn’t mention stomach acid, just water. However, according to the procedures of pharmaceutical quality inspection, the disintegration and dissolution of ordinary tablets and capsules are all carried out in a simulated stomach environment, both in terms of pH and temperature. However, the dissolution of ordinary tablets and capsules has little to do with pH. If you want to see the process of dissolving the drug when the capsule is broken, you need to use warm water. If you have used gelatin or soaked bear candy, you know that the gelatin in cold water will absorb water and swell but will not melt.
Here are some more cool pictures of tablet disintegration:
My heart exploded after reading it
Normal tablets look like this and will fall apart very quickly (but these pictures are still accelerated). Because of this, normal tablet disintegration time needs to be within 15 minutes. We are going to do a disintegration experiment in the pharmacy class, which is to prepare artificial gastric juice, set a temperature of 37°C, and put the tablets into a hanging cage with a fine sieve underneath. Even the fine particles of the sieve are disintegrated.
Enteric-coated tablets cannot be dissolved in the simulated gastric environment, and then they need to be able to disintegrate smoothly in the simulated intestinal environment. Sustained and controlled release pills see the specific structure and principle. In fact, the most fun is osmotic pump film, but I can’t find the video…
The so-called osmotic pump tablet means that there is a pump driven by osmotic pressure inside the tablet. The hole has a high osmotic pressure cavity inside, which absorbs water to expand, and then squeezes the drug ingredients in the tablet out of the small hole.
Pills sprouted? ? No, this is after getting wet, the osmotic pump squeezed out the medicine… | fu-80
Author: Window Knocking
One AI
However, being sick doesn’t feel good at all…
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