Industry body calls for greater scrutiny of patients with multiple repeat prescriptions to tackle ‘growing problem’
Archived version: https://archive.is/newest/https://www.theguardian.com/business/2026/aug/08/wasted-medicine-in-england-could-fill-75-swimming-pools-a-year-pharmacy-group-says
Disclaimer: The article linked is from a single source with a single perspective. Make sure to cross-check information against multiple sources to get a comprehensive view on the situation.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
Yes, and? It’s familiar and universal, swimming pools aren’t.
That is, uh, quite the claim.
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’.
No, it’s just not how people think, and there’s good scientific research to back that up. Our numerical intuition doesn’t do large numbers, that’s why we have representational systems like decimal notation, and it has to be developed. We have to be learn even basics, like that 3 × 7 = 21; numbers like 100,000 cubic metres fall into the mental category of “large,” unless you put in the mental effort to break that down into column 1m by 1m that stretches from your city to the next 5 times.
Journalists, and the NPA in this case, are going for a visceral impact. What’s this irrelevant talk of building a foundation? Were they publishing blueprints, or an engineering brief? Or even a context in which precise quantities matter? No, it was an article about wasted medication in England, and they exactly did want a quick way to convey “a lot”, and since most people in Britain do know what a swimming pool looks like, it’s an apt visual metaphor. (By the way, 17,000 snakes would be a terrible visual metaphor, again, because the number is too big.)
We poke fun at the weird comparisons in the “anything but metric” community, so I turned it around, and the whole joke here is that stating it as 187,000 megaliters is more difficult to grasp quickly, and doesn’t actually add useful information in this context.
But, maybe I’m wrong. How is the precise volume of medicine wasted annually in England relevant in your life?