subject: How Does The Body Get Rid Of Medicine? [print this page] Medicines are engineered to break down in the body after they have accomplished their goal. That's why you may end up taking bi-daily, daily or even weekly doses of a medication to keep it actively circulating in your body. Lincoln Home Health Care knows that in order to understand how the body gets rid of medicine, you must first understand how the medicine travels through the body itself.
Lincoln Senior Care states that the way medicines work can be broken down into four stages: Administration, delivery, performance and elimination.
Administration itself is the process of introducing the medicine into the body. Sometimes this happens orally, via the epidermis by a cream, or intravenously. The difference between these methods of entry is primarily how fast the medicine then enters the next stage, delivery.
In delivery, the medicine enters the bloodstream and gets transported around the body in order to be used. While the actual route that medicine takes to enter the bloodstream varies and thus the rate of absorption and even duration that the medicine lasts depends on this, it all generally needs to enter the bloodstream in order to do anything. It is from there that it gets delivered by your circulatory system to your organs and tissues within your body.
It is at the next stage that the medicine actually does what it's intended to do. The performance stage describes your body metabolizing, using the medicine's chemical components and ultimately breaking them down. Knowing that your medicine simply doesn't 'disappear' from your body is vital to understanding where it goes next.
When drugs get broken down, they have the potential to become toxic if they're left to buildup within your body. This is just like any other waste that your body's cells produce and therefore it generally gets taken care of the same way. Cytoplasm in cells typically breaks down the chemicals from your used medicine into simpler components and then those chemicals are evacuated from your cells and into your bloodstream. They then go to your liver, where your blood is filtered from toxins, and stay there until they're ready to be passed to the kidneys.
Lincoln Elderly Care understands that the majority of toxins in the body are excreted via the kidneys. That's why it's so important to drink water, unless you're on a water restricted diet. The kidneys function better when you help 'flush' them with water. They're also able to more rapidly remove more dangerous toxins and remain healthy if you don't let chemicals build up in them.
