2007-10-15-Pharmacy

At the suggestion of Paul Trusten, I also wrote to the National Association of Boards of Pharmacy (and for good measure wrote to the California board as well). Note that the form linked seems to be the most appropriate as the most obvious form on the California board site is designed around making a complaint not an inquiry.

Slightly altered for the audience:

I came recently came across yet another article about the importance of double checking pediatric prescriptions for ml/cc/tsp errors. Not only do I find articles like this fairly regularly (mostly pointing out how common and dangerous such errors are, especially with infants), but my daughter was also prescribed an overdose as an infant (1 teaspoon instead of 4 ml), which was fortunately caught by an alert pharmacist.

It seems the easiest and best way to solve this problem is to require prescriptions to always use metric exclusively. Given droppers with ml on them are readily available, there's no reason for consumers like myself to be confused (you just read to the line that says 4ml) and it solves a whole slew of issues (from prescription errors to using teaspoons out of the drawer which have a very high variance).

Is there currently any movement to change the regulations to require such, and if not could the California Board of Pharmacy please start changing the regulations to be exclusively metric?

Rather than making these errors just harder to do, let's just make them go away completely.