I gave my speech for a university class last week on abolishing the death penalty in the United States. In the course of this speech, I cited the amount of potassium chloride used in the injection in the unit of milligrams per kilogram of body weight. The speech went well but in my comments I got back from the professor she mentioned being unhappy about me using this. She said in her notes that it "made it unclear to the rest of the class what unit you were talking about as most of them do not know what a kilogram is". While it was true that the first question I got from everyone in the class after the speech was about the mg/kg figure, I went to the professor and explained to her that it was the commonly used unit for administering drugs even in the US. She reluctantly accepted it and erased the note with the proviso that I was to use dual units in all further speeches in order "to avoid confusion and provide us with a clear frame of reference".
Score one for metrication intolerance. I guess what bothered me more was several in the class were going for nursing or medical degrees and needed it defined. I can almost understand no one in class knowing what a kilogram was because my state does not teach SI very much if at all, but the idea of possibly leaving my life in the hands of someone who hasn't had proper training in dosages of medicines scares me. Mike -- "The boy is dangerous, they all sense it why can't you?"
