Posting this under the heading it deserves: Reading a syringe in poor light, and how to avoid needing to — what changed since Everything below is what sits behind that.
What changes if the standard account of Reading a syringe is wrong? I ask because I have been treating it as settled and I noticed this week that I could not say why.
Working through the consequences rather than the evidence, since others here are better placed on the evidence.
Check what the graduations actually say rather than what you expect. A syringe marked in units and one marked in millilitres look similar at a glance and are not the same instrument.
I would want a second opinion before relying on that.
Post #2 describes the usual case. This is about the unusual one.
U-100 means the barrel is graduated for a solution containing one hundred units of insulin per millilitre. For anything that is not insulin, the units are simply hundredths of a millilitre.
Insulin syringe graduations: U-100 syringes are marked in units where 100 units = 1 mL. Always confirm your syringe is U-100. Confusion between insulin units and milligrams is the most common syringe error.
Anyone with a larger sample, please post it.
Nothing here is medical advice, and anybody uncertain about technique can have it demonstrated by a nurse or a pharmacist in five minutes, which is a better use of the time than reading about it.
This is where my knowledge stops and I would rather mark the edge than blur it.
Where I have landed on Reading a syringe, having got it wrong once in public: the direction is clear, the magnitude is not, and anyone quoting a precise magnitude has borrowed it from somewhere that did not measure it.
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