Wrong spoon size may cause errors in medicine dose
from themedguru.com by Kangna Agarwal
New York, January 6 – Most of us have a habit of grabbing the kitchen spoons while taking liquid medicines. However, a new study warns that wrong spoon size may cause dosing errors as people tend to pour either too little or too much of the medicine.
“Clearly we know that there are a lot of people — despite all the alternatives they are offered — who open the kitchen drawer and grab a spoon to serve up their liquid medicine,” observed study co-author Koert van Ittersum, an assistant professor of marketing in the College of Management at Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta.
“But previous work has already shown that the size of your mug or glass influences how much one pours,” he noted. “Just as the size of a plate influences how much one eats. So, here we have found that utensils also have an effect on dosing because our mind plays tricks on us. And so spoon size matters.”
195 students studied
To find out whether spoon size may cause medicine dosage errors, Ittersum and colleagues focused on 195 students who had visited the university clinic during the cold and flu season.
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They were asked to pour 5 mL (equivalent to one teaspoon) of liquid cold medicine into different sizes of teaspoons.
To give them a basic understanding of the volume of a teaspoon, the volunteers were first asked to pour 5 mL of the medicine in a normal/ actual sized teaspoon.
Following this exercise, they were asked to pour the same amount in a medium sized and then a larger teaspoon.
At the end of each exercise, the volunteers also reported how confident they felt that they had poured the correct 5 mL dose.
Spoon size found to cause dosing errors
The researchers found that the doses significantly varied according to the size of the spoon used, even though the participants reported an above-average confidence that they had poured the accurate dose while using one or the other tablespoon.
For instance, while using a medium sized tablespoon, the participants poured an average of 4.58 mL, which was around eight percent underdosed than the prescribed limit.
And they poured 5.58 mL when using a large tablespoon which was nearly 12 percent more than prescribed.
The researchers cautioned that these types of dosing errors may really add to ineffectiveness for the tired and sick people who are prescribed such doses every four to eight hours for several days.
Therefore, one should use more reliable and exact measuring dosing devices such as measuring caps or droppers, dosing spoons and/or dosing syringes when taking liquid medicines, they concluded.
Findings of the study are published in the Jan. 5 issue of the journal Annals of Internal Medicine.