On Sat, Feb 24, 2007 at 09:29:28PM +1100, Pat Naughtin wrote: > Might I suggest that you look at some of these references extracted > from the 'Institute for Health Freedom' web page. > > Institute of Medicine Reports that Medication Errors Harm 1.5 Million > Patients Annually > > The Institute of Medicine (IOM) reports that medication errors harm at > least 1.5 million patients every year. This figure includes drug > errors in hospitals, nursing homes, and among Medicare outpatients. > But it is a conservative estimate because it does not account for drug > errors in doctors? offices or by patients themselves.
To give you a bit of an idea of the issues it can cause: * Hospitals are metric. Almost exclusively (they interface with patients in imperial, but everything is written down in metric). * Pharmacies are metric * General practitioners are a mixed bag, largely not understanding metric (or refusing to acknowledge it's existence). In my own experiences, I've had a pediatrician try to describe 4ml as "a little bit less than a teaspoon". I asked if she really meant 4ml, to which she said yes, but wrote down 1tsp anyway on the prescription. When the pharmacist saw it, they asked how much my daughter weighed and then went ballistic as she was being prescribed an overdose. Oddly, after ensuring that I knew that the proper dose was 4ml, the pharmacist insisted in writing down 1tsp as that's what was on the prescription. :( It'd be really interesting to find out hard statistics on dosage errors based on using imperial in a metric world. Paul
