Got some insulin on a napkin, not sure how much, could been a lot, then wiped mouth with that, could that get in your mouth and be absorbed/or around the mouth on skin and be absorbed as if you injected it?
Nope. You have nothing to worry about. Insulin cannot possibly get into your system that way. It gets destroyed by saliva and your stomach entertainment. If we could ingest insulin somehow, we wouldn’t have to stuff it through our skin.
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Even if it was a lot, like 100u? Not that it might’ve been that much but if it was…also have a cut near mouth, would it get thru a open cut/be absorbed?
I promise, you’re okay. It’s just not that easy to get insulin to absorb.
It’s possible an infinitely small amount of insulin could get in through the cut, but it’s highly unlikely, and if it did it would be too small of an amount to matter. Wounds leak and ooze outwards and quickly wall themselves off as a security measure, there’s not enough pressure on the surface to pull external things in through a cut.
Not many medicines can be absorbed through the skin, because it is so difficult to permeate. The few that can have to be specially designed for absorption.
And then there’s the napkin… They really hold onto liquid. You can test that one yourself. Fill an insulin syringe with water, squirt it on the napkin, then see how much you can squeeze back out of it. 100 units really is a tiny amount of liquid. I bet even the cheapest napkin could hold onto that. There’s a difference between being able to feel moisture on the napkin and getting that moisture OFF the napkin. (But this point it’s moot anyway, given that you have to get the insulin down into the subcutaneous layer to start with)
It might smell/taste awful, but most of us would jump at the opportunity to eat insulin or absorb it through our skin if we could.
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If I could swallow insulin and have it do anything besides make me sick, I would be drinking the stuff.
Vials up. Drink em if you got em
rick
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If only. We wouldn’t be injecting the stuff if you could absorb it through your skin or stomach. Well, except for Afrezza. But even that you can only absorb through your airways, not your skin.
Insulin is a protein. So that’s why it gets digested in our mouths and stomach. It’s 3 chains connected together. So it is a gigantic molecule. It’s too big to be absorbed through the skin.
And if the chains break even a little bit, it becomes ineffective.
I have long hoped someone could come up with a chemical version of insulin that our bodies would accept as the real thing.
It’s not a crazy idea, I think it’s possible, and we could take it by mouth.
For now we are stuck with this gigantic poly peptide molecule with all of its limitations.
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