If natural approaches like boosting your water and fibre intake don’t help to alleviate your constipation, a new pill that takes a radically different approach to constipation treatment could help those wanting to avoid medications. It instead delivers vibrations that help kickstart the body’s natural processes for getting rid of waste.
There’s no single guaranteed cure for constipation, because there’s no single cause for the condition, which is defined by doctors as someone having fewer than three bowel movements in a week. It could be a result of a person’s ongoing diet, or an adverse reaction to a specific thing they ate, travels, or even stress.
When changes to diet or increasing physical activity don’t alleviate the problem, most people can turn to prescription or over-the-counter laxatives, which either pull more water into the colon to soften stool for easier passage, or stimulate the walls of the intestine to help get things moving again. Vibrant takes the latter approach, but without the use of any drugs.
Vibrant still comes in the form of a pill, but before swallowing (around bedtime each night), it first needs to be activated by inserting it into a smartphone-connected pod. The pill makes its way through the body the same way food and other orally consumed medications do, but it isn’t dissolved or broken down by stomach acids. Vibrant capsules are made from the same medical-grade material as pill cameras and are engineered to be durable enough to survive even accidental bites. Instead, it delivers relief by making small vibrations in three second intervals (three seconds on, three seconds off) to help stimulate nerve cells that trigger peristalsis: the wave like muscle contractions that push food and waste through the body.
After being swallowed, the pill vibrates for about two hours, goes dormant for around six hours, and then vibrates once again for another two hours. It remains completely intact until it exits the body (hopefully along with the blockage causing the constipation), when it’s then flushed away. It doesn’t sound like the motorised mechanism inside the pills is rechargeable — not that you’d want to reuse one after its first fantastic voyage.
The pill’s efficacy was tested in a study where 200 people dealing with chronic constipation took it every night for eight weeks, with 40% of the group reporting at least one additional bowel movement every week. Only 23% of an additional group of 149 people who took a placebo during the study reported having at least one more bowel movement per week.
Unlike most laxatives, Vibrant doesn’t cause side effects like diarrhoea; however, a small minority of test subjects were actually able to feel the pill vibrating inside them. But it wasn’t uncomfortable enough to stop them from taking it on a daily basis.
Vibrant was actually approved by the US Food and Drug Administration last August, but is only now finally available for doctors to prescribe. According to the Vibrant website, it’s available with a “self pay option” for about $US2 ($3)-3 per day.