Kitchen Spoons Don't Work for Meds

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 medi…