Industry body calls for greater scrutiny of patients with multiple repeat prescriptions to tackle ‘growing problem’
  • esc@piefed.socialEnglish
    6·
    12 days ago

    Thanks! I don’t have any idea how big a ‘swimming pool’ is, but one cubic meter of water contains 1000 liters so 187 mliters is actually helpful in providing understanding how big it is.

    • SwingingTheLamp@piefed.zipEnglish
      54·
      12 days ago

      Right, most people have never seen a swimming pool, have no sense of its size, and can’t visualize it. But everybody instantly knows what 187,000 cubic meters looks like.

      • esc@piefed.socialEnglish
        81·
        12 days ago

        Swimming pools are different and often built according to external constraints like building size or plot size, while 187000 cubic meters look loke a line 187 kilometers long 1 meter high and 1 meter in width. For me personally that’s a |ot easier to visualize than a ‘swimming pool’ of water. Small lake can contain millions liters of water easily, same with pools.

        • SwingingTheLamp@piefed.zipEnglish
          11·
          11 days ago

          An Olympic swimming pool is 0.05km long, by 0.025km wide, by 0.002km deep, which, certainly, is not nearly as relatable to everyday experience for most people as 187km.

          • esc@piefed.socialEnglish
            3·
            11 days ago

            Glad that we agree on this! 👍🏽

            Anyway swimming pool and olimpic pool are different things and again it’s really hard to eyeball volumes of water while it’s really easy to approximate distance. Most people are at least somewhat aware of distance to the nearest bus stop, or town, or city. E.g. I know that distance to the next city is ~20 km.

            • SwingingTheLamp@piefed.zipEnglish
              11·
              11 days ago

              Uh oh—you’ve just related a quantity to a sensory experience, exactly what the National Pharmacy Association did in order to quickly relate a large quantity to most people’s numerical intuition without requiring them to do math. (Sure, it’s not precise, and 75 swimming pools is probably not enough to converge on the mean volume for swimming pools, but what are you calculating that’s relevant to the issue?)

              1 Distance to the Next City is not in the metric system!

                  • esc@piefed.socialEnglish
                    2·
                    11 days ago

                    Its how people think really, when someone builds a house and needs foundation (for example) they don’t use 37 bathtubs or 1,5 swimming pools of concrete, they use cubic metres. When someone trains they don’t use 1 to 2 donkey of weight, they use actual measurable easily weights. When someone travel they don’t travel 17000 snakelengths to another country. You can imagine all of these measuremental aids without problems, and they are relatable and known to any child. They just sound ridiculous and nonsensical and don’t actually convey anything that can’t be used interchangably with ‘a lot’.