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Kitchen Spoons Don't Work for Meds

The amount of medicine poured varies with the size of the spoon.

Many patients and parents use kitchen spoons to dose liquid medications, but the accuracy of spoon dosing is questionable. These authors conducted a simple study in 195 university students to examine the effect of spoon size on dosing of liquid medication.

Students were asked to pour a 5-mL (teaspoon) dose of cold medicine into a teaspoon, a medium-sized tablespoon, and a larger spoon. The amount of medicine poured varied with the size of the spoon: Participants underdosed by 8.4% (amount poured, 4.58 mL) with the medium-sized tablespoon and overdosed by 11.6% (amount poured, 5.58 mL) with the larger spoon. When asked to judge their dosing accuracy, participants had above average confidence that they had poured the correct dose into the medium and larger spoons.

Comment: Although the dosing errors demonstrated in this study might seem inconsequential for a cold medication, the cumulative effect of 20% variation in the delivery of medications could have considerable clinical impact for drugs with tighter risk-benefit profiles. Clearly, the size of the spoon is important when patients pour their medications. We should encourage parents to use accurate measures (e.g., measuring cap, dropper, or syringe) rather than convenient utensils for liquid-medication dosing.

— F. Bruder Stapleton, MD

Published in Journal Watch Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine January 27, 2010

Citation(s):

Wansink B and van Ittersum K. Spoons systematically bias dosing of liquid medicine. Ann Intern Med 2010 Jan 5; 152:66.

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Reader Remarks:

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• Extremely important
  Dr Umesh ojha, DELHI, 5 Feb 2010 11:58 PM EST
  Long awaited article. i was not aware of this much variation !
  
  congratulations for picking up a topic which has... [more]