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Resistance to SI units pervades medicine

Nature volume 538, page 459 (2016)Cite this article

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More than half a century after SI units became standard, pockets of resistance to their adoption still persist — at least in medicine (see also Nature 537, 279; 2016).

Many specialists in the radiological disciplines, including myself, still think in terms of the old units — not for diagnostic dosing (becquerels are well established) but for radiation treatment, measured in curies.

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  1. Offenburg University, Germany

    Andreas Otte

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  1. Andreas Otte
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Correspondence to Andreas Otte.

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Otte, A. Resistance to SI units pervades medicine. Nature 538, 459 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1038/538459e

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  1. Jean SmilingCoyote

    I'm not familiar with most of the SI units which aren't used by "average" people in the course of daily life. I did note that the blood pressure measurement in millimeters is at least in metric, which is an advance over most usage in the USA. The numbers given in pascals which equal the millimeter BP measurement used in the author's example aren't just less "user-friendly"; the 3 numerals after the decimal point, especially the 2nd & 3rd, introduce precision that is an overreach as well as unfriendly to users. What would a BP device be like which didn't measure kilopascals out to 3 decimal places? The fractional units are basically a result of the conversion from one unit to the other. My own example is from sewing textiles and leather, where my work doesn't need great numerical precision. I will use both English and metric units, depending on which results in the fewest fractions.

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