PHARMACEUTICAL TABLET

Tablets are a solid unit dosage form of medicament or medicament with a suitable excipient. Tablet is a 

Pharmaceutical Oral Dosage Form or Solid Dosage Form . The most popular dosage form of tablets is The Compressed Tablet. Generally, tablets orally, but also can be administered sublingually, buccally, rectally, or intravaginally. The tablet is one of the forms that an oral drug can take such as elixirs, syrups, suspensions & emulsion. For identified; tablets are frequently stamped with, letters, numbers & symbols. The range of tablets to be swallowed from a few millimeters to about a centimeter. With the help of polymer coating can make the tablet smoother & easier to swallow.

Easier to swallow pills 

TABLET PROPERTIES:

Tablet can be made in any shape, but the requirements of patients & tableting machines mean most are round, capsule, or oval-shaped. If we will give the shape of tablet differ from oval, round; then patients get these harder to swallow, and have more chipping or manufacturing & pregnable problems. The shape & diameter of the tablet are determined by the machine tooling used to produce them a die plus an upper & a lower punch are required; known as a station of tooling. Tablets should be hard or tuff enough that they don't break up in the bottle, & also friable enough that they dispart in our gastric tract.

In lubricants in tablet or hard gelatin capsules, commonly minerals like silica or talc & fats, eg- magnesium stearate or stearic acid, vegetable stearin are frequently used. 

Tablet of different shape 

TYPES OF TABLET: 

PILLS: Pill is around, small & solid pharmaceutical oral dosage form of medication.

Pills

CAPLETS: Caplet is an oval-shaped, smooth-coated medicinal tablet in the general shape of a capsule. There is an indentation between many caplets that's why they can be divided/ split in half so easily. After the inception of the capsule, it has been seen by consumers the best & most efficient method of taking medication. For this reason, OTC Analgesic (producers of the drug) 

wanting to emphasize the strength of their product developed the "caplet", a portmanteau of " capsule-shaped tablet", in order to tie this positive association to more efficiently-produced tablet pills, as well as being an easier to swallow shape than the usual disk-shaped tablet. 

Caplet

ORALLY DISINTEGRATING TABLET (ODT): 

It is an orally disintegrating tablet or orodispersible tablet (ODT), is a form of drug dose & it is available for a limited range of over-the-counter (OTC) & prescription medications.

Orally disintegrating tablet

ADVANTAGES:

*User Aspect (doctor, pharmacist, patient)Lightest & most compact 

• Easy handling
• Greatest dose prescription & least content variability

*Production Aspect

• High Stability
• Large scale production at the lowest cost 
• Easiest & cheapest to package & ship.

* Tablet is most stable with respect to physical, chemical & microbiological attributes.

* Tablet is the cheapest oral dosage form, easy to use & carry out with attractive & elegant appearance.

DISADVANTAGES :

• Bitter taste drugs, drugs with an objectionable odor, or sensitive to oxygen or moisture may require encapsulation or the tablets may require coating.
• Some drugs resist compression into dense compacts.
• Drugs with slow dissolution, poor wetting, intermediate to large dosage may be difficult or impossible to formulate & manufacture as a tablet that provides adequate or full drugs bioavailability.

INFORMATION FOR PATIENTS ON THE DANGERS OF TABLET CRUSHING:

"DON'T RUSH TO CRUSH"

If someone hard to swallow tablets or capsules then, it's easy to think is to crush a capsule or tablet to make swallowing easier. But we should never crush a tablet or open a capsule without checking that it is safe to do so or not. If leaflet which comes with your medicine says the medicine is suitable for crushing, mixing, or opening with food, then it is probably safe to do so.

don't Rush to Crush

WHY WE SHOULD NOT RUSH TO CRUSH THE TABLET:

Crushing tablets or opening capsules which are not designed to be taken in this way:-

• It may cause serious side effects.
• It may prevent the medicine from working properly.
• It also may slow down recovery from illness.

* NOTE: THERE IS  SPECIAL MODIFICATION IN SOME TABLETS AFTER YEARS OF RESEARCH; THAT SOME TABLETS WHICH CAN MEAN THE DRUG IS RELEASE VERY SLOWLY, SO WE NEED TO TAKE ONLY ONE TABLET OR CAPSULE  A DAY.

-AKSHITA SRIVASTAVA