If a fire doesn’t extinguish itself then it needs to be put out. When a person has IBD there isn’t literally a fire in their digestive tract but a lot of the time it darn well feels like there is. The burning can be quite fierce, but human beings still need to eat and whether they have a normal functioning digestive system or not. Normal fires can be extinguished with torrents of water, but no matter how much of it you drink you’d still suffer from IBD symptoms. Medications like Linzess work though, so let’s look at how to take Linzess at night. 

The answer there might be more of can you take Linzess at night. You can, but it’s inadvisable because when a person is asleep and lying in a prone position the body’s digestive process slows considerably. This means that medication is absorbed much less effectively, and when it is medication that is working on the stomach and upper intestine directly that’s even more of a problem. The recommendation for Linzess is that you take it in the morning on an empty stomach and 30 minutes before you have breakfast.  

So, the most honest answer for how to take Linzess at night is to only do that if you’re not going to be sleeping during the overnight hours. We’re not sure if vampires get irritable bowel disorder or chronic idiopathic constipation, but if they do, they’re the only ones who will be perfectly fine with that arrangement. People who work graveyard shifts and have this same digestive disorder may be the exception to that. But if you’re a 9-5 person then you probably don’t want to be taking Linzess at night.  

Slow and Steady 

We’re going to get all pharmacological for a bit here as we continue talking about how to take Linzess at night, or more specifically why you shouldn’t do that. This is a  guanylate cyclase-C stimulator class medication, and without getting too pharma what that means is that it stimulates the production of chlorine and bicarbonate from intestinal cells. More of each means less pain and burning from irritable bowel disorder, and that’s how this medication works for IBD relief.  

If your digestive system goes dormant as you slumber then less of that production happens, and more of the active ingredient in Linzess – Linaclotide – ends up passing through the digestive system without being absorbed. Nothing to like about that, especially if you are really suffering with IBD. Enough said about all this. How to take Linzess at night? You shouldn’t, and unless you’re up all night you should take it in the morning instead.  

The last thing we’ll do with this entry is provide some information for anyone who might be asking why is Linzess not working. For people who are having insufficient IBD relief or the same type of reduction in severity for CIC it is usually because of accelerated emptying of the stomach and fast digestion. As we’ve explained here Linzess is a medication that needs to be absorbed fully by the lining of the gut, and if that doesn’t happen it won’t work well.