Would you rather swallow needles or poke them into your skin?

If you’re someone who doesn’t like to see needles when you visit the doctor’s, there may be some relief for you?but it still involves needles. Confused? Well, experts say they have developed a new way to help people who have trypanophobia (fear of injections) or who take regular, painful shots.

The trick, according to researchers is to replace an injection with a pill, but that pill contains small needles designed to deliver certain drugs once they enter the gastrointestinal system. This new system allows medications that would otherwise be rendered ineffective by the digestive process to be delivered directly into body as they would in a traditional, external injection.

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How is it possible to send needles into the body without them causing harm?

According to experts, there are no pain receptors in the GI tract, meaning that people who swallow small, sharp objects generally don’t feel them pass through the system. By encapsulating 5mm, hollow needles into pill form, researchers were able to fill those needles with the desired medication and have it pass through the stomach without being broken down. By the time the needles reach the intestines, the outer capsule is gone, and they are able to inject their contents into the intestinal lining.

During the study, this process was completed successfully with in pigs, using insulin as the drug filling the needles. After ingestion, researchers were able to monitor the pigs’ insulin levels and see the drop in blood glucose caused by the micro-injections.

“The kinetics are much better and much faster-onset than those seen with traditional under-the-skin administration,” said author Giovanni Traverso to MNT. “For molecules that are particularly difficult to absorb, this would be a way of actually administering them at much higher efficiency.  This could be a way that the patient can circumvent the need to have an infusion or subcutaneous administration of a drug.”

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While the implications for use to avoid painful injections is monumental, individuals with trypanophobia will also be able to benefit. Healthline indicates approximately 20 percent of the population has some fear of needles, with 10 percent of people having actual trypanophobia. As many as 20 percent of people who fear needles avoid medical treatment because of it.

“This is a very interesting approach. Oral delivery of drugs is a major challenge, especially for protein drugs,” wrote Prof. Samir Mitragotri, a professor at the University of California-Santa Barbara – who was not involved in the research. “There is tremendous motivation on various fronts for finding other ways to deliver drugs without using the standard needle and syringe.”