But It SAID To Take Ten Codeine, Honey!

By Alicia Dorr in News on Nov 30, 2006 8:57PM

Plenty of people have had one of those moments where they thought for sure that bottle of generic Vicodin said to "Take four with bottle of pinot grigio," but it turns out that kind of behavior could actually cause some serious problems.

According to a survey by some peeps at Northwestern University, more than 40 percent of people reading the instructions on medicine bottles are misunderstanding them. The study, published in the Annals of Internal Medicine, found that English-speaking patients with no record of any sort of reading impediment simply didn't understand what "take one every 12 hours meant."

Call us callous, but, um, we don't get it. What we mean to say is that we understand the instructions, but we don't understand how more than 60 percent of people who can read over a sixth-grade level (and nearly 40 percent of those who can read at ninth or above) didn't understand what they were reading. Take one every twelve hours isn't a double negative or anything, right? It's not like asking the two guards where to go in the labyrinth and trying to figure out which one always tells the truth and which one always lies, right? The researchers said they were "unbelievably startled by this," and we have to second that emotion.

Then again, we are reminded of the time we had to stay inside for recess writing our name over and over because when the point of an excercise was to follow all directions carefully, we forgot to put our name on the test. Maybe the moral of this story is that if you don't know how many pills to take, ask your doctor (or first-grade teacher) to help you. Because it's all fun and games until someone doesn't get the right dosage, and we like you too much to see you suffer.

Photo via Edward Ishak's Columbia page.