The Bioavailability Lesson

The Problem We Were Trying to Solve

After reading about repurposed drugs and compounds like mebendazole, ivermectin, curcumin, and others, one problem kept showing up: absorption. A compound can look powerful in a dish and still barely reach the bloodstream when swallowed as a normal pill or powder.

Mebendazole especially bothered me. It is poorly soluble, and a lot of the discussion around it online treats the dose as if swallowing more automatically means the body is getting more. That is not how pharmacology works. If a compound does not dissolve well, absorption can become wildly inconsistent.

At the same time, my mom was struggling with pill burden, nausea, and a stomach that had been through too much. The practical problem was not just "what agents look interesting?" It was "how could anyone tolerate all of this, and how much is actually getting in?"

Why SEDDS Caught My Attention

In pharmaceutical research, self-emulsifying drug delivery systems (SEDDS) and related lipid formulations are used to improve absorption of poorly soluble compounds. The basic idea is that oils, surfactants, co-solvents, and emulsifiers can sometimes help a stubborn compound disperse into much smaller droplets after it hits the gut.

That matters because smaller droplets can create far more surface area. More surface area can mean better dissolution. Better dissolution can mean better absorption. In controlled research, this can produce big differences in exposure.

The danger is that the same logic cuts both ways. If absorption goes up, toxicity and drug interactions can go up too. "More bioavailable" is not automatically safer. It can be the opposite.

What We Tried, Broadly

We tried to create a crude, home version of a lipid-based approach for a poorly soluble drug. Broadly speaking, the idea involved dissolving or dispersing a finely crushed compound, combining it with a lipid/emulsifier system, and using agitation to try to push it toward a more uniform liquid.

That sounds cleaner than it was. We did not have pharmaceutical equipment. We did not have particle-size testing. We did not have assay testing to prove how much was dissolved versus suspended. We did not have stability data. We did not have therapeutic drug monitoring. We had theory, desperation, and visual guesses.

Visually, the result was not what I wanted. A true nanoemulsion is usually expected to look much more uniform and often more transparent. What we ended up with looked cloudy. My best guess is that it was closer to a microsuspension with undissolved particles than the clean formulation I had hoped for.

Where I Think It Went Wrong

Looking back, I think there were several problems. The compound likely needed a stronger and more appropriate solubilizing system than what we were using. The container setup may have introduced moisture. Moisture can matter because even tiny amounts can change how a poorly soluble drug behaves. We were also trying to solve a pharmaceutical problem without pharmaceutical controls.

The bigger issue was her body. By that point, her stomach was already damaged and reactive. Something that might be tolerated in a healthy gut can become brutal in a fragile one. After more bloating and pain, and after another hospital visit, it became obvious that the gut situation changed the entire risk calculation.

Around that same time, we learned that the tumor on her liver had grown quickly. Her liver enzymes had not warned us in the way I would have expected. That was one of the cruelest lessons: labs can look stable while the disease is still moving.

What I Wish I Had Understood Earlier

• Poor absorption can make a protocol look weaker than it is, but improving absorption can also make it more dangerous.
• A cloudy mixture, visible particles, or inconsistent dispersion can mean the formulation is not doing what you think it is doing.
• Gut damage changes everything. The same substance can behave very differently in a healthy GI tract versus an inflamed or radiation- damaged one.
• Without testing, you do not know the dose the body is actually seeing. You only know what went into the mixture.
• Piperine, grapefruit, oils, solvents, emulsifiers, and other "bioavailability boosters" are not harmless tricks. They can change exposure to multiple drugs at once.

The Bottom Line

I still think bioavailability is one of the most under-discussed issues in alternative and repurposed-drug cancer circles. People compare doses as if everyone absorbs the same amount. They do not. Formulation, food, bile, gut health, genetics, drug interactions, inflammation, and liver metabolism can all change exposure.

But I also think this is exactly why people should be careful. Once you start trying to manipulate absorption, you are no longer just "taking a supplement." You are changing pharmacokinetics. That is a serious medical question, not a kitchen experiment.

If this page does anything useful, I hope it makes people ask better questions: How well is this absorbed? What changes its absorption? What else could it raise levels of? What labs should be watched? Is there any human data? And who qualified can help think through it?