Some pills are effective when administered directly to the body.
Lidocaine is a great example.
You can put lidocaine into an adhesive band aid like thing and stick it to your skin in the place where you’re feeling joint or muscle pain. When doing this, the lidocaine can absorb directly into the affected area. Drugs like ibuprofen or acetaminophen take a lot longer to settle in, and there’s no guarantee if they’ll entirely relieve pain in certain places in your body. I have had a lot of positive effects from lidocaine patches for this known idea, but I wouldn’t try to use one to repair a stomach ache. There are other medicines being used as topicals, some ancient and some new. For years there has been benadryl cream for allergic reactions, but nowadays you can entirely get weed in topical form. They come in creams, lotions, bath bombs, and patches. Just like with any other topical medicine, the system is to target a certain place of pain. If you have a patch, you can do slow absorption over a long phase of time. Just like with THC enriched cannabis topicals, you can also find hemp and CBD filled topical products. My pharmacist told me that she sells a lot of full spectrum CBD cream and lotion to older folks who use them for things like arthritis, joint pain, and nerve damage. She says that of them swear by it and attest that there is nothing else like it for relieving their chronic pain. I would have had no clue that CBD topicals were so famous with senior citizens, but it makes a lot of sense to myself and others in retrospect.