When you hold medications in your mouth with water and swallow once they dissolve does it decrease the medication's effectivity?

Answer 1

Oral medication is coated for a few reasons, but the most prevalent is that the medication is intended to dissolve in a certain part of your body. For instance, your stomach resists acids a lot better than your mouth or esophagus, so aspirin, which is an acid, it typically enterically coated so as to not release the medication until it's in an area where the aspirin will do the least damage. Holding an aspirin in your mouth until it dissolves isn't likely to increase the efficacy of the medication -- in fact it may reduce it -- as well as hurting your mouth. For non-coated meds, they'll typically dissolve very fast in your stomach, so the onset of the medication's effects will differ by almost no time at all. In a very few meds you might get a faster onset of the medication's effects, but this is rarely the case, and in some cases may be quite dangerous. So -- in summary -- usually no appreciable difference, and where there is, it may be dangerous.