Here's the scoop from the 3rd year medical student currently rotating through a family medicine clinic (i.e. me): Medicine is taught mostly in metric. There is a very strong trend among hospitals towards metric usage only. This is at least due to a couple of obvious factors: medical literature is predominantly metric, and major hospitals are frequently teaching institutions. A notable exception among the hospitals is the Veterans Administration system. No Celsius or kilograms present in any of these hospitals or clinics. It makes you wonder, since the VA is a government institution.
Smaller offices and clinics tend to be non-metric, though some surprisingly do use metric. For the most part, vitals are recorded in pounds, inches, and F. No conversions. Even the BMI is just looked up. Places that have the Electronic Medical Record systems (EMR) for patient data, do have the ability to convert to metric or use it exclusively, but don't. In this case, all the calculations that would require metric, like BMI, are just done by the computer. At this point I"m speculating, but I suspect that the more surgical or specialist an office is, the more likely it is to use metric. There are still many imperial holdouts that persist in medicine: needle gauge and length, surgical thread lengths and diameters, all gauze and bandage products, scissor sizes, and guidewire diameters for vascular surgery. There are probably more examples, but this is what immediately comes to mind. Remek > I go to my doctor, and give the staff my weight in kilograms, and the nurse > takes out a calculator and converts it. Annoying. > > I'm going this Saturday; let's see what happens. > > Carleton > > -----Original Message----- > From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf > Of Paul Trusten > Sent: Thursday, October 29, 2009 16:12 > To: U.S. Metric Association > Subject: [USMA:46089] Metric-only doctor visit > > > Without any fanfare at my doctor visit this morning, I asked the nurse > if she could take my temperature in degrees Celsius. Equally without > fanfare, she did. > > The mechanical scale weighed me in pounds, but I calculated the result > in kilograms and talked kilograms only when I met with my dictor. > Without fanfare, he listened. > > > > > > > > > > Paul Trusten > >
