Crushing Tablets – What You Need To Be Aware Of

More and more individuals have difficulties swallowing medicine when it is offered to them in the form of tablets or capsules. Dysphagia is a condition which has an effect on all age ranges though it is much more common in the very young and the very old. Dysphagia is a particularly acute difficulty in care homes for the elderly where about 1/3 of residents might suffer from it which makes caring for them a far more complicated and time intensive process. Dysphagia consequences can be very severe as it can obviously interfere with medicine management and medication management proscribed by medical professionals if the affected person is not willing or unable to take treatments in tablet form. Whenever pills are taken orally they can sometimes create a blockage and lead to choking. Tablets may also become trapped in the throat which can result in damage of the throat as well as the medicine not being effectively distributed round the body. Up till now the most common method of coping with the issues that Dysphagia presents has been tablet crushing in order to make treatments less difficult to swallow. However crushing tablets is not the simple answer it looks and it can effect the way the medication works in the body. A lot of tablets have a sugar coating on them to make them taste more pleasant and even though crushing them won’t have any kind of impact on the efficiacy of the capsule it could make them taste very unpleasant. Many of the pills and tablets produced these days come with an enteric layer that’s designed to keep the pill together in the stomach. Pills with an enteric coating should never be crushed because the covering is there either to protect the stomach from the medicine or guard the medicine from the effects of the stomach . Luckily there is now an alternative solution for those who suffer from Dysphagia and also the people that care for them. The assortment of liquid medicine that’s produced today is larger than ever before with more liquid medicines on the way. Oral liquid medicine may be used to deal with the results of a variety of ailments and conditions and the range of illnesses it can be used to treat is growing all the time. Liquid medicines have a number of advantages over other kinds of medications not least of which is the fact that they are considerably easier to take for people suffering from Dysphagia .