I have a bottle of “Ultra Strength Antacid Tablets Calcium Supplement” labelled as being distrubted by Safeway Inc. of Pleasanton, CA, that I purchased in the US, in front of me. Under “Drug Facts” it lists the active ingredient as Calcium Carbonate 1000mg.
Wouldn’t saying “1g” be sufficient? A milligram is 1/1000 g, so what the label is saying is equivalent to 1000/1000 g, which if turned in to a middle school teacher, might result in a bad grade for failure to reduce fractions.
Have we gotten to the point where pharmaceutical firms actually believe that people don’t understand metric prefixes and will be like “omg these antacids have 1g CaCO3 while this other one has 1000mg, which is like 1000 times more medicine so I ought to go with it”?
Yes. And, largely speaking, they’re right. People are, by and large, idiots, and idiots in pain are even more idiots. It’s much easier and safer to label like drugs in like units, even when those large numbers units are equivalent to other units.
WAG but I think it’s just standard practice to list drugs in milligrams, probably because the active ingredient in most OTC drugs will be less than a gram per dose/tablet.
And even if these not so bright people were not around, from a safety point of view its virtually always a good idea to have a fixed standard for how things are “done”. Its amazing how often even mental giants have brain farts or misread something.
Gotten to the point? When did we ever leave that point?
This whole “people are dumber today” business give me a pain. Until WWII less than half the population graduated high school and only an elite 5% went to college. Does anyone really think the general population’s understanding of anything was higher then? Have you ever read any of the thousands of denunciations of the public’s lack of knowledge that can be found every year since the Declaration of Independence?
On a totally separate issue, keeping all dosages in milligrams is a good thing. It makes no more sense to write 1000 milligrams as 1 gram than it does to write 1000 dollars as 1K dollars. Consistency of expression helps everyone.
I could be wrong, but there may be some sort of standardization of medication dispensing units. In one particular medical database, the units for medication “milligrams” and “milliliters”. Having a single standard for medication means that there is little chance for a units conversion error.
You’re obviously not a scientist or engineer. Writing 1000 milligrams as 1 gram makes perfect sense. That’s the whole point of the metric system.
The metric system is rarely formally used to measure currency values, so seeing 1 K$ looks a little odd, but it still makes perfect sense. And plenty of people use the terms “kilobuck”, “megabuck”, and “gigabuck” informally to talk about large amounts of money.
Regarding drug labeling - many medicines have their recommended dosages measured in micrograms, and there does not seem to be any attempt to use milligrams to reduce the risk of unit-conversion-based dose errors here. For instance, this drug info sheet:
simply lists 25mcg, 50 mcg, and 100 mcg, not 0.025 mg, .1 mg, etc.
My guess is that the actual value listed on the label is chosen for marketing reasons. As the OP suggested, most people are morons, and no company wants to cede the moron market to their competitors by requiring their customers to understand the metric system.
[QUOTE=Absolute;12584408
Regarding drug labeling - many medicines have their recommended dosages measured in micrograms, and there does not seem to be any attempt to use milligrams to reduce the risk of unit-conversion-based dose errors here. For instance, this drug info sheet:
simply lists 25mcg, 50 mcg, and 100 mcg, not 0.025 mg, .1 mg, etc.[/QUOTE]
Right. Not every medication is listed in mg. Some are listed in mcg, some in g, some, believe it or not, in grains! (Really?! Who the hell uses grains anymore?! My teacher, that’s who. Maybe she’s just trying to teach us in case we work for a 103 year old doctor someday.) But I’ve yet to come across (which is not the same as it never happens!) the same medication in two different units for different doses. If it’s given in mcg, it’s mcg across the board.
Prescriptions, on the other hand, can be in any damn unit the doctor pulls out his ass. It’s up to nurses and pharmacists to make the conversions, and yes, we spend a lot of time doing math problems in nursing school.
I would like to meet one of these people so I can take a picture and in the future when I have children show it to them as an example of how in life you’re bound to run into douchebags.
Oops, forgot my on topic comment. Similarly, where I work I frequently put together information that involves dollar amounts in the millions and billions. And I do my damnedest to avoid ever switching units. If I’ve got stuff in the milllions and then something is in billions it will get written as $145MM and then $1023MM rather than $145MM and $1.023B. If everything is in the billions then I’d just say $1.023B.
This isn’t because I think the audience is stupid (they may be frustrating but they aren’t stupid), it is just easier to process relative amounts very quickly without having to do what is, admittedly, a very simple translation.
Extra strength Tylenol used to be advertised as “a thousand milligrams strong” on TV- “a single gram strong” just doesn’t sound as big to most people in this country. They say 1000 mg instead of 1 g for the same reason television sizes are diagonal- it’s a bigger number. Maybe they should say “a million micrograms strong”!
Fun stuff for the metrically challenged- a $1 US bill is 1 g in mass- so are the other bills. 1 liter of water is 1 kg of water and one km is about 5/8 of a mile.
Eh-hem. It might make perfect sense, but it’s not right. “1 g” means anything from 951 to 1049 milligrams - unless, course, you’re taking about a mass definition, but I don’t think anyone thinks they’re buying international standards of mass in a vitamin bottle.
Do I think each pill has exactly 1000 mg? No. I know better. But that’s another issue.
But companies DO list ingredients in standard units. If you looked at other brands of the same medicine, you probably would find “500 milligrams” or “1500 milligrams”. Look at your vitamin bottle - some ingredients are list in milligrams and others in international units. Decimal places are also avoided, as they can be mis-printed or mis-read.
OTC medicines are NOT exempt from regulations that include strict labeling requirements.
Anyway, it’s not particularly unusual in the metric system to use a smaller unit and a 4-digit number. Look at the specs for a European car on wikipedia (like this), for example. Lengths listed in millimeters, weights listed in kilograms.
Well assuming you’re thinking of significant digits, you mean 500 to 1500 milligrams, but in any case so does 1000 milligrams. Now 1000. milligrams is more accurate.
I don’t think there’s any advantage for companies to take the risk that a confused customer will leave the bottle on the shelf rather than know at a glance that a 1000mg tablet of Vitamin C is twice as large as the 500mg one and four times as large as the 250mg one.
FYI that’s how they do it in the UK too - not just the US. And I have some vitamin C here that I bought in Hungary and that is also listed in mg, so it might be an EU labelling requirement.
1000mg isn’t exactly the same as 1g - it’s exactly the same as 1.000g
In order to keep the same precision, in this case you’d end up needing exactly the same amount of characters, while making it more complicated to compare two boxes straightaway. That “more complicated” isn’t very serious for people who know their conversions, but I still get a headache remembering the problems my college students had with decimal system conversions. I’d rather not assume that people know their conversions, thank you.