The country’s leading group of pediatricians is urging the medical community to switch to the metric system in order to prevent kids from landing in the ER.
The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), which has been advocating for metric measurements for decades, just issued its strongest statement yet in favor of moving away from our current measurement system. In new guidelines published on Monday, the doctors’ group proposed that everyone who comes into contact with children’s medication — including drug manufacturers, pharmacists, doctors, and parents — should all start using milligrams.
“For this to be effective, we need not just the parents and families to make the switch to metric, we need providers and pharmacists too,” Dr. Ian Paul, the lead author of the AAP’s new metric dosing guidelines, told Reuters.
Doctors favor the metric system because they hope it will avert common mistakes that end up hurting kids. Each year, parents make more than 10,000 annual calls to poison centers because their kids have accidentally ingested medication or taken the wrong dosage of their own prescription. More than 70,000 children wind up in the emergency room because of accidental medication overdoses.
Much of the issue stems from simple user error because our current measuring system is confusing. Parents who need to give liquid medication to their kids are more prone to making measurement errors when they’re given a prescription that’s written in teaspoons or tablespoons; some of them even end up using kitchen spoons because they’re more easily accessible.
Metric measurements, meanwhile, are simpler because they rely on a decimal system. Since the liter system is expressed in factors of ten, converting between measurements simply involves moving a decimal point, rather than trying to remember how many teaspoons equal a tablespoon. That’s why researchers think a milliliter-only system doled out by syringes could help prevent parents from making common measuring errors.
In fact, according to a recent study in the journal Pediatrics, dosage mistakes are cut in half when the prescriptions are written in metric units instead.
“Medications and doctor visits with sick children can be confusing, and we ought to do what we can to make sure that instructions are clear, using consistent units that are the same on the label and the device used to measure,” Dr. Roy Benaroch, an assistant adjunct professor of pediatrics at Emory University in Atlanta, told HealthDay News.
Along with the AAP, other major medical associations have been raising concerns about confusing measurements for oral medication for years. The Institute for Safe Medication Practices, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), have all advocated for clarifying dosages and allowing doctors to move toward the metric system.
Although the AAP’s new guidelines do not address this, some doctors also recommend switching to recording weight and body temperature in metric measurements because that data is used to calculate effective medication dosages, and it can be confusing for doctors to switch back and forth.
The U.S. is one of just three countries in the world that doesn’t currently use the metric system — something that remains a source of frustration for metric enthusiasts and scientists alike. Some advocates argue that failing to move the country toward the metric system has ultimately left Americans more scientifically illiterate than residents of other countries, because scientists and non-scientists are not speaking the same language.