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Taking medication has its own rules. You may be accustomed to taking medicine using plain water, but what if you take medicine using tea or milk? Are there any side effects?
Take medicine with tea
Drinking medicine using tea, especially green tea, can cause some side effects, this is because some of the ingredients in tea can inhibit the absorption and action of the drug. One of them is caffeine. Caffeine is a component that can stimulate heart rate and increase blood pressure even though it is only temporary. Apart from caffeine, the tannins in tea can also significantly reduce the absorption of iron in supplements or foods.
Several types of medicinal ingredients that interact negatively with green tea include:
- Adenosine: found in anti-arrhythmic drugs. This drug is usually given to patients who experience heartbeat instability. Green tea can inhibit the action of adenosine, thereby reducing the effectiveness of the drug.
- Benzodiazepines: the caffeine in tea can reduce the sedative effects of benzodiazepines. This component is commonly found in drugs used to treat excessive anxiety such as diazepam.
- High blood medication: the caffeine content in tea can increase blood pressure in those who take drugs containing beta blockers, propranolol, and metoprolol. This type of drug is commonly used to treat high blood pressure and diseases related to the heart.
- Blood thinners and aspirin: the content of vitamin K in green tea can reduce the effectiveness of types of blood thinners. And if you mix aspirin with green tea, the reaction will make the blood difficult to clot, thereby increasing your chances of bleeding.
- Chemotherapy drugs: a study suggests that consumption of green tea and black tea can stimulate genes that play a role in prostate cancer so that chemotherapy treatment for this disease will be less efficient.
- Oral contraceptives (birth control pills): if taken at the same time as oral contraceptives, the stimulant effects of caffeine in the body can last longer than it should.
- Other types of drugs that should not be taken with tea are stimulant drugs, such as asthma drugs and hunger suppressants.
Take medicine with milk
You may often hear the advice not to take medication using milk. This is not completely wrong, but also not completely true. Medicines, especially the types of antibiotics taken orally, can only work effectively if the components in the drug can be absorbed by the body. The drugs consumed will be processed in the digestive system and then circulated through the bloodstream to the area of the body that is sick.
There are several things that affect how the drug is absorbed by the body, including the level of acidity in the stomach and the presence or absence of nutrients such as fat or calcium in the stomach. Some types of antibiotics contain tetracyclines which will react with calcium in milk. Calcium will bind to the components contained in the drug, thus inhibiting the absorption of the drug by the body.
But there are also types of medicine that can be taken together with milk or other foods. This aims to protect the stomach from medicinal properties that might irritate the stomach lining.
Before deciding to take a drug, you can ask your doctor or health worker what you should take the drug with, if there are any side effects if it is taken together with other foods or drinks. However, if there are no specific rules, it's a good idea to take medicine using only plain water, because there are no ingredients in plain water that can inhibit the absorption of the drug by the body.
