We love our pills. Mainly because they’re not needles or a gluggy liquid that tastes like burnt plastic. Pills are easy to swallow and they’re cheap.

But according to researchers from Johns Hopkins University, they’re the least efficient means of delivering drugs into the body.

Why? Because the rate at which the pill is dissolved in the stomach and then dumped into the duodenum differs wildly, depending on if you’re standing up or lying down.

The new study shows that depending on your posture, it can take up to an hour longer for the body to absorb the medicine in a pill.

For patients in pain or on a regime where the levels of the medicine in the body need to remain fairly constant, this difference can be problematic.

But … come on … swallowing a pill.

Surely it’s not rocket science?

As the researchers advise: ‘‘The oral route is actually the most complex way for an active pharmaceutical ingredient to enter and be absorbed by the body.

‘‘The bioavailability of the drug in the gastrointestinal (GI) tract depends not only on the drug formulation but also on the dynamic physiological environment in the fed stomach.’’

This dynamic environment is created a ‘‘complex interplay of factors’’ such as the contents of the stomach, stomach motility (the contraction of the muscles that mix and propel substances through and out of the stomach), and the gastric fluid dynamics (the sloshing around of liquid in the stomach).

Posture affects how quickly the body absorbs medicine. Image: JHU

How these all work together generates ‘‘complex pill trajectories’’, determines how well the pill breaks down, and when it is emptied from the stomach and into the duodenum, which serves as the beginning of the small intestine.

The point being

As the authors explain it: Most pills do not start working until the stomach ejects its contents into the intestine.

So the closer a pill lands to the last part of the stomach, the antrum, the faster it starts to dissolve and empty its contents through the pylorus (a kind of sphincter valve that controls the exiting of stuff from the stomach) and into the duodenum.

‘‘If you’re aiming a pill for this part of the stomach, posture is critical to play into both gravity and the natural asymmetry of the stomach,’’ the authors say.

Think of trying to kick a goal against a blustery breeze.

And the winner is …

To investigate the way the stomach behaves in different real-life conditions, when full of food and in the process of breaking it down to liquid, and with varying churning and contracting motions, the team built a stomach simulator.

The simulator allowed them to test different postures.

They found that taking pills while lying on the right side was by far the best, sending pills into the deepest part of the stomach to achieve a dissolution rate 2.3 times faster than an upright posture.

Lying on the left side was the worst.

The team was very surprised to find that if a pill takes 10 minutes to dissolve on the right side, it could take 23 minutes to dissolve in an upright posture and over 100 minutes when laying on the left side.

“We were very surprised that posture had such an immense effect on the dissolution rate of a pill,” said senior author Rajat Mittal, a professor of mechanical engineering and an expert in fluid dynamics.

“I never thought about whether I was doing it right or wrong, but now I’ll definitely think about it every time I take a pill.”

He said the study showed that “for elderly, sedentary or bed-ridden people, whether they’re turning to the left or to the right can have a huge impact’’.

Standing upright was a decent second choice, essentially tied in effectiveness with lying straight back.

It’s worth noting that in an unrelated community advice blog, Johns Hopkins advises that swallowing pills while standing or sitting is the safest option. Just not as efficient.