I would be a little skeptical about this, activated carbon is used to color black licorice, and if that made birth control pills not work I'm pretty sure it would be bigger news.

[–] [email protected] 28 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Some studies point towards activated charcoal interfering with medication.

As always, consult your doctor before consuming anything that could fuck up your medicine.

[–] [email protected] 24 points 6 months ago (1 children)

This seems to be about medical uses where the dosage is orders of magnitudes bigger than in food coloring

[–] [email protected] 16 points 6 months ago (1 children)

That's true. In retrospect I also think I'm kinda comparing apples to oranges, since the drugs in those trials were also all administered intravenously so likely had a different rate of bioavailability when compared to your average prescription medication.

According to that study, activated charcoal seems to screw around with enteroenteric circulation, so I dunno if that might affect how well drugs that are taken orally are absorbed.

I might have a look further into this, see what studies I can dredge up.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago

Yeah IV administration is definitionally 100% bioavailable; there might be some degree of the IV drug effluxing from the bloodstream, across the gut lumen, back into the intestines where orally administered charcoal could absorb it. However orally administered drugs will definitely be absorbed by oral charcoal

[–] [email protected] 17 points 6 months ago

depends how much charcoal is in it and when/how the medication is supposed to be absorbed