Just sent the following to the
Mayo Clinic.
Having had my daughter prescribed an overdose due to mL/tsp mixups, I have a deep interest in the metrication of the health industry.
Given you are a leader in this field, I'm wondering if you could share with me the data you used to make your decision to go completely metric?
I would also like to work with Mayo staff to petition congress and other health care organizations to make metric a mandated standard for all medical practices. Good practices that save lives shouldn't just be used by forward thinking clinics.
Hopefully, we'll be able to spawn a little more movement towards a metric health system.
If you're interested in the problem of dosage errors in medicine, the following links may interest you:
Not only do many people make the mistake of using a teaspoon out of the drawer (which can vary from 2.5 mL to 10 mL (these were the maximums from the various studies)), but there are common errors with mixing up tablespoons (a 3x error) and mL (a 5x error). These mistakes won't go away until we standardize on mL.
These and many other articles I've read all lead to the same conclusion: teaspoons and tablespoons have to go. They're just too dangerous.
