[Corpora-List] medication pronunciations

[Lucian Galescu]

My guess is that humans have a hard time pronouncing correctly the  
names of the drugs they're taking. But most of time one doesn't need  
to: one either grabs the container off the shelf or presents a written  
prescription to the pharmacist (or talks about what ails them rather  
than what medicine they'd like to buy). However, there are documented  
cases of serious errors, some resulting in fatalities, when people in  
emergency rooms mispronounced the names of the medicines they were  
taking. FDA and USP's Institute for Safe Medication Practices collect  
data about drug name confusions (both orthographic and phonetic), but  
the general sense is that there is a lot of underreporting.

Lucian


* * *
Lucian Galescu, PhD
Research Scientist, IHMC


On Mar 28, 2008, at 3:38 PM, maxwell at umiacs.umd.edu wrote:

> Donna K. Byron wrote:
>> Med names are notoriously OOV and the preferred
>> pronunciations are difficult to predict
>> from the spellings.
>
> That strikes me as odd--surely they're mostly OOV for humans, too;  
> so how
> do humans decide how to pronounce them when they read e.g. the label  
> on a
> medicine?  (That's assuming of course that you're under 20, or you  
> have a
> microscope to read the label :-).)
>
> Or is it the case that people have lots of different pronunciations  
> for a
> single medicine?
>
>   Mike Maxwell
>   CASL/ U MD
>
>
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