How’d you like to be a waiter in that restaurant?
Or the bus boy!
“Excellent choice, Asshole.”
The main answer is that the stomach is the safest route to take anything, because it is designed to breakdown and absorb materials.
Some medications cannot go this route because they are rendered ineffective, like insulin as was mentioned. Others include blood thinners like lovenox and heparin, some hormonal therapies, cancer drugs, etc.
Obviously, when you go to a hospital your condition is serious enough to warrant IV therapy. Some people in the hospital are given suppositories like tylenol for fever or something for nausea when they cannot swallow anything for whatever reason.
[Best Allan Sherman voice ON:]
“Every time you take vaccine,
take it orally.
As you know the other way,
is more painfully.”
[/Best Allan Sherman voice]
Swallowing it is easier than having a hole drilled in your stomach and then having it stuffed in. Many medications need to be absorbed early in the GI tract. That means they have to start in the stomach. Swallowing it is the easiest way and certainly preferable to any other way I can think of to get it in there.
Do suppositories come in hollowpoints?
Many drugs are acidic anyways. Ever notice how they are all somesort of drug-HCl? The stomach secretes hydrochloric acid, and the medications are already acidified with HCl, so there isn’t much more breaking down it can do. If the compound were to decompose in HCl, then it usually couldn’t be packaged and sold, and would likely never even make it past feasability stages in the development of the drug in tablet or capsure form - it would have to be somesort of injection or have some other form of delivery.
For once, I’m glad I kept an old college textbook.
Source: The Organic Chemistry of Drug Design and Drug Action, Richard Silverman, pp.278-9.
A neat trick of the trade is to have a pill made of inactive compounds. Then, after it’s metabolized in the liver, the byproducts are an active drug that produces the desired effect. These types of compounds are called prodrugs.
Some medications are inhaled (e.g. asthma medications) or applied to the skin (e.g. testosterone) or taken as nasal sprays (some immunizations).