Mike, I got ill reading this. Talk about fingernails on a blackboard!
You would be quite correct in leaving your statement in the units mg/kg and standing your ground with utter confidence, since the entire healthcare establishment would be with you. Dosing drugs by body mass is always expressed in such SI units (mg/kg, mcg/kg). In 30 years of pharmacy practice, I have never seen dual units in such a report. I would have asked her if she wanted grains per pound. Would the audience have understood grains? I wonder how she would have reacted to milligrams per square meter of body surface area (sorry, we're not in the textile business, we don't do square yards!). Also, as you said,this was a university audience, and almost by definition, it should have been beyond metrophobia. Paul T> Quoting Mike Millet <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>: > 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?" > -- Paul Trusten, R.Ph. Public Relations Director U.S. Metric Association, Inc. Phone (432)528-7724 www.metric.org 3609 Caldera Boulevard, Apartment 122 Midland TX 79707-2872 USA mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] http://home.grandecom.net/~trusten
