Errors ranked by how much dose they move
A pharmacist catches most of these in licensed practice. In this market there is no pharmacist, so the checks have to be structural.
Syringes & units
Page 3 of 4 of this archive, newest first.
Priming a pen is not optional
Aseptic technique here is four steps and none of them are difficult. They are, however, routinely compressed to two.
The convention nobody explains before handing over the vial
The graduation interval differs between barrel sizes, and a 1 mL barrel is frequently marked in two-unit steps. Reading one as though it were marked in single units halves…
A needle is a single-use instrument
For licensed products the in-use period is established by stability data. For a peptide reconstituted at home there is no such data, and the honest answer is that nobody…
Mapping a rotation that you will actually follow
Repeated injection into the same small area produces lipohypertrophy — thickened, rubbery subcutaneous tissue with blunted and erratic absorption. It is common, it is…
Four millimetres is enough, and the data says so
A 4 mm needle at ninety degrees without a skin pinch is adequate for essentially all adults. The persistence of 12.7 mm needles in this market is habit, not reasoning.
Gauge, pain and flow rate
Gauge affects pain and flow rate rather than depth. A finer needle is more comfortable and slower, and with a viscous solution the difference is noticeable.
Lipohypertrophy, and the absorption it ruins
A rotation scheme that is too complicated will not be followed. We describe the simple ones that are.
What a 1 mL syringe does that a 0.3 mL syringe does not
The graduation interval differs between barrel sizes, and a 1 mL barrel is frequently marked in two-unit steps. Reading one as though it were marked in single units halves…
The intramuscular injection nobody intended
The insulin injection-technique literature is large, well conducted and directly transferable on questions of depth and tissue. We say where it stops transferring.
The convention nobody explains before handing over the vial
Dead space in the needle hub is a real and calculable loss, and it matters more at small volumes than anybody expects.
Reading a barrel: the graduation that is not the one you think
We work through the arithmetic in full, because it is short, and because the errors it prevents are order-of-magnitude errors.
How a correct calculation becomes a wrong dose
We have catalogued what readers report, ranked by the size of the dosing error each produces.
Choosing a needle for a subcutaneous peptide
A 4 mm needle at ninety degrees without a skin pinch is adequate for essentially all adults. The persistence of 12.7 mm needles in this market is habit, not reasoning.
Units, millilitres, milligrams: three scales on one small object
Insulin syringes are graduated in units on a convention that fixes 100 units to one millilitre. That convention says nothing about how much peptide is in a unit, and…
The intramuscular injection nobody intended
A 4 mm needle at ninety degrees without a skin pinch is adequate for essentially all adults. The persistence of 12.7 mm needles in this market is habit, not reasoning.
Site selection when the tissue has already changed
A rotation scheme that is too complicated will not be followed. We describe the simple ones that are.
What a 1 mL syringe does that a 0.3 mL syringe does not
We work through the arithmetic in full, because it is short, and because the errors it prevents are order-of-magnitude errors.
The site you keep using is the site that stops working
Repeated injection into the same small area produces lipohypertrophy — thickened, rubbery subcutaneous tissue with blunted and erratic absorption. It is common, it is…
A needle is a single-use instrument
For licensed products the in-use period is established by stability data. For a peptide reconstituted at home there is no such data, and the honest answer is that nobody…