How come it takes so long for a pill to kick in for me?

Question

I am 24, male, with a fast metaoblism and im very thin. All the pills and everyone always say that it takes... for things like Benadryl and Ibuprofen, 25 minutes to kick in but for me it takes a good hour to 75 minutes why might this be?

Answer 1

Uhm, that depends on your digestion system and the size of your body.. The drugs require much more time to effect when your body is tall, or large.

Answer 2

Couple of things. There are two big things that come to mind when we talk about how long meds take to kick in: absorption and first pass metabolism.

When you eat a pill it falls down into the stomach, dissolves, and the drug gets passed into the small intestine and into the blood stream. How long this takes depends on how fast your gut tends to move, how much you've got in it, and a bunch of other factors you really can't change. This is the big one. Meds on empty stomachs tend to get absorbed faster, but they also tend to p**s off your stomach a bit more.

First pass metabolism is more or less exactly what it sounds like. All the nutrients absorbed by your small intestine are dumped into the venous system, and gets fed directly to the liver before it gets used as food. This gives the liver a chance to break down anything nasty inside it before it gets to the rest of the body. So any drug you take, the liver gets to chew up a portion of it, and a small portion gets by. Variations in how well your liver does this (due to more factors than I can possibly list) could affect how long it takes a therapeutically useful dose of drug to get into systemic circulation.

The most profound effect  is the first, but the second can become an issue with certain drugs and certain people.