[Corpora-List] medication pronunciations

[Terry]

In 2003, the 21 most frequently prescribed drugs in the United States had
the following names: Hydrocodone, Lipitor, Synthroid, Zithromax,
Amoxicillin, Furosemide, Hydrochlorothiazide, Norvasc, Lisinopril,
Alprazolam, Zoloft, Albuterol, Aerosol, Toprol-XL, Zocor, Premarin,
Prevacid, Zyrtec,  Lbuprofen, Levoxyl, and Propoxyphene. 

 

 

  _____  

From: corpora-bounces at uib.no [mailto:corpora-bounces at uib.no] On Behalf Of
Lucian Galescu
Sent: Saturday, March 29, 2008 6:08 AM
To: corpora at uib.no
Subject: Re: [Corpora-List] medication pronunciations

 

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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