Thanks to generous community support, Bonnie Kaplan, PhD, of the Faculty of Medicine and the Alberta Children’s Hospital Research Institute for Child and Maternal Health and her students in the Behavioural Research Unit / Dept of Paediatrics have been able to work with hundreds of children and adults to develop a new way to learn how to swallow pills.

Their method, based on head posture, is helping children who have difficulty swallowing their medication. Changing the tilt of your head when swallowing pills can make all the difference between being successful or not. The study finds that children who have never been able to swallow a whole pill can become successful by learning various head positions.

Making the act of swallowing pills easier for kids can have enormous benefits. “If a child with a chronic or acute illness, such as cancer or arthritis, cannot swallow a pill, it can be a huge problem. Some medications are very difficult to turn into liquid form, or taste horrible when they are liquid. There are cases where children cannot leave the hospital because they have to keep getting their medications through an IV or injections,” says Kaplan.