I know you’re not a doctor but I’m looking for information and have yet to see it covered anywhere.
Instructions for dosing says it’s to be taken thirty minutes after a meal and at the same time every day.
The thing is, I don’t eat meals at a set time. If I have a big breakfast, I skip lunch and have dinner early. I have breakfast at different times. Lunch can be an issue if I want to go out. So I can’t consistently both take it after a meal and take it at the same time every day.
Also, what constitutes a meal? Is a bowl of cereal enough? How about some soup and crackers? I can’t find anything that defines it.
I understand there is some leeway in the “same time every day” restriction, but how much? An hour? Two?
And which way? An hour before the usual time? Two?
If you can, take tamsulosin in the morning, after breakfast or the first meal or snack of the day. This is because the highest levels of medicine are in your body 6 hours after you take it. This will give you the most benefit during the daytime when you’re most likely trying to pee.
You should take tamsulosin (Flomax) 30 minutes after the same meal every day to ensure that your body absorbs the right amount of medication. Taking it on an empty stomach can cause your body to absorb too much of the medication, which raises your risk of side effects.
I’d just take it shortly my first meal of the day.
(I’m pretty sure the ‘same time every day’ just means, roughly, every 24 hours. I.E. not a dose before bed and another first thing in the morning less than 12 hours later.)
ETA: Massively ninja-ed. Oops. that’s what I get for being thorough. But here’s some anecdote to go along with cites …
I take mine immediately post-dinner or post-returning home from dinner out. Which is anywhere between 4pm and 8pm or occasionally 10pm. And anywhere from 5 minutes to 3 hours after I ate. If somehow I forget my post-dinner meds, I take them at bedtime. Which varies between 9pm and midnight or occasionally 2am.
Over the ~5 years I’ve been taking the stuff I have not noticed that it greatly matters.
Here’s the official FDA-approvd package insert:
Under pharmacokinetics they point out it takes 5-7 hours after a meal to achieve full absorption, and meal size doesn’t matter. It also takes 5 days after you start before the drug reaches full concentration in your body.
IANA medical anything, but I'd interpret all that as stomach upset is a sorta common side effect, having some food in your belly reduces that and slows the drug absorption leading to smaller spikes in total drug load in the body.
I’d also suggest that lots of medicine label instructions are written very emphatically because lots of medicine consumers lead chaotic lives.
The point isn’t that you need to be utterly regimented. But that eating it at random once per calendar day, including 11pm followed two hours later at 1 am, would be a poor outcome. As fainting would be one sign of a too-high dose, that’s something they really want to avoid: folks doubling up just due to chaotic timing.
So don’t do that. And don’t sweat the details. Stress is bad for you.
Thanks to everyone for the advice. I wasn’t stressed about it, but was just confused over the logistics of it. I’ve actually been on it for a month but the 30 minutes after a meal is easy to miss.
The odd thing is that I had no symptoms of enlarged prostate - no trouble peeing at all. They only discovered it was enlarged in an CAT scan that turned up a kidney stone.
It does dry me out. I have to keep a thermos of ice water by the bed to get through the night and I have to make sure I’m drinking enough.
I’ve always interpretted the “half hour after a meal” as meaning “half hour after my first bite”. It takes 10 minutes to eat a sandwich, 20 minutes to eat a full dinner, then a few minutes to put the dishes away, pour a fresh drink of whatever, wander into the bathroom, and eat the pill. 30 minutes.
Since waking up 4-5 times during the night to pee was my major symptom, with my doctor’s permission I switched from taking it at breakfast with my supplements to taking it shortly before bed when I take my statin, independently of when I last ate, and that’s worked without side effects for the past six months. YMMV.
One of the potential side effects is low blood pressure a couple hours after you take it. IIRC when I got started my doc suggested taking it post-dinner rather than post-breakfast so any BP issues would happen in bed, not out and about or at work.
Made sense to me and I’ve done it that way ever since.