When Chemists Attack

News from the department of the obvious: Basic medical instructions hard for most adults, study finds

The subject of the article is how folks have trouble following “health instructions”, which is … not surprising in the least. We do pretty poorly in many areas of science literacy – medical science certainly isn’t an exception.

But here’s the quote that I’m going to fuss about, since I’m your friendly neighborhood chemist.

A consumer may want to know the salt content before buying, but the word salt isn’t on the label.

“Of course, they wrote ‘sodium,’ but that’s a technical term, that’s a chemistry term,” [Dr. Rima] Rudd said. “You don’t sit at the family table and say, ‘Pass the sodium please.”‘

Well of course you don’t ask someone to pass the sodium at the dinner table. Pure sodium is a soft, metallic element that reacts violently with water. It would be a decidedly bad thing to pass around at the family table. The stuff you pass around at the dinner table is a sodium-containing compound called sodium chloride.

Plus, “sodium” is hardly a more technical term than “gold”, “silver”, “iron”, or “oxygen”.

“They’re writing things at a level in the health field that is very difficult for the general public to work with,” Rudd said.

While I’d certainly agree that information leaflets that come with prescription drugs are written in a language that is difficult for someone without medical training to understand, I do not think the same thing applies to “sodium” on the side of a soup can. Anyone who makes it out of high school without enough knowledge to know a few basic things about what common table salt contains has been done a disservice.

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 7th, 2006 at 9:24 am and is filed under Science education. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.