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Apple Autocorrects Names of Some Medications to Names of Different Medications
- nykolasz 9y agoI found this happening with many other domain specific keywords. However, this can be deadly with medications.. Scary.
- Aloha 9y agoNo spellchecker can be infinite - its always up to the user to ensure they are actually saying what they mean.
- nixpulvis 9y agoSpell checking is something that doesn't happen automatically when you hit spacebar or send though...
- Aloha 9y agoit does and can - its app specific behavior - mac apps can be setup to automatic spellecheking, or just flag the word as suspect.
- DecoPerson 9y agoI’d say that’s “autocorrect” rather than “spell check”
- Aloha 9y agoSemantics for this discussion - the library used is for both spellchecking and autocorrection.
- stan_rogers 9y agoNo, "semantics" suggests that the behaviour is approximately the same. Spellcheck highlights possible errors and awaits user action, while autocorrect silently changes things. They may use the same dictionaries, but they are only distantly related otherwise.
- jmm5 9y agoTrivial for Apple to compile a list of all medications and fix this.
- nixpulvis 9y agoYou're joking right?
- function_seven 9y agoIsn't there a database of medications? Parse that and include it in the dictionary. https://druginfo.nlm.nih.gov/drugportal/ https://druginfo.nlm.nih.gov/drugportal/, for example.
- sk5t 9y agoLike most things, it only seems simple from a distance. Between branded, generic, ingredient, and chemical names, there is diversity and ambiguity in drug naming.
- drewmol 9y agoIt seems you both are correct... And that's where the problem originates
- cknoxrun 9y agoMy Database/Company (https://www.drugbank.ca https://www.drugbank.ca) contains a list of CC0 names they could use that are international, and it's updated daily.
- iClaudiusX 9y agoThey seem to have no problem autocorrecting brand names and trademarks. Why wouldn't they do this for something as important as medication?
- pygy_ 9y ago
- 0x0 9y agoThis is a disaster waiting to happen. Scary.
- csydas 9y agoWell, yes, but I think the issue is slightly blown out of proportion. On my 10.10.5 Macbook Air I tested quick and the issue is simply that duloxetine is not part of the dictionary and fluoxetine is. Even as I write this post I have the red line under duloxetine. I'm not sure how the association was made on their particular computer, but it raises a good point about how the annoyances of AutoCorrect can cause some difficulty. My last name, for example, is mostly unique, but is one letter off from a type of fabric. It was mildly irksome until I had the dictionary learn my name. (At least one goof up at an airport after buying auto-corrected tickets) In this case, there is of course a simple fix, which the author should apply, and if being deployed in a work environment where the change is important, there are steps that probably should be taken to resolve such issues, and better visible custom dictionary files. (looking on various *.exchange site when searching for "bulk add words to macOS dictionary provides many solutions) So I agree, that it's a problem, but it's not intentional malice here on Apple, workarounds are available, and it's a really good feature request that ought be a pretty low hanging fruit.
- gumby 9y agoI heard this problem discussed in a talk about electronic medical records 20 years ago. One of the many drivers was to remove the "burden" of the pharmacist. The speaker (who had an EMR company, and was pro EMR) said that actually the pharmacist was a crucial preventer of error as they would notice a strangely chosen medication (usually a pull-down-list mis-click back in the late 90s) and call the doctor for clarification. Ironically this would often piss off the patient who was waiting for the prescription!
- bonzini 9y agoThis happened to me eight years ago, though the prescription was for my wife. The pharmacist just ignored the prescription because it made no sense for the symptoms, and the dose was correct for the other medication. So it was obvious to him what she had to take.
- eitland 9y agoI'd say that would also be scary..!
- pavel_lishin 9y agoWhich part? The pharmacist deciding which medication to give you? It makes sense to me - they're looking at inputs, and using their professional training and experience to make the right choice. It's no scarier (or, alternatively, as scary as) a doctor listening to your heartbeat and measure your blood pressure and choosing which medication to prescribe.
- antoineMoPa 9y agoAutocorrection in general is bad. Underlining errors and proposing corrections is OK. As a keyboard user, I expect what I type to show as-is on the screen. I can always correct later. Also, autocorrection does not provide proper feedback to learn from mistakes. Underlining errors does.
- niftich 9y agoI've seen people argue that autocorrect is part of the input mechanism of on-screen smartphone keyboards. The rationale goes, with a physical keyboard of respectable size, you make much fewer typing mistakes than with a virtual keyboard on flat glass where the touch targets are tiny. To compensate for the inferior precision, autocorrect comes in to figure out what you meant. As a thought experiment, consider voice input. Voice input is often used when a screen isn't even available for feedback, so the computer has to figure out if it thinks it transcribed you correctly. To make the usability bearable (and to keep the computational difficulty down), contemporary systems don't ask you for clarification; they just try to transcribe your sentence against a dictionary. For the voice-controlled systems of today, "autocorrect" is definitely part of the input mechanism.
- dizzystar 9y agoOn Android, there is a top strip of suggested words that you can tap (seems to be one on iPhone?). It's pretty decent, and is definitely a part of how I type, which is basically, type 2 to 3 letters, tap the word I want. I can write some lengthy emails quickly using this style of typing, and I really don't use autocorrect that much. Touch-screen typing is an entirely different interface than a physical keyboard.
- antoineMoPa 9y agoI somewhat agree with this compensation logic, however, I think the correction is not intelligent enough to be bearable yet (Not context-aware, no grammar support, poor support across languages, etc.). I type my stuff faster without autocorrect. Also, the post is about a macbook, which has a keyboard.
- carussell 9y agoThis is reminiscent (in scope for errors, not mechanism) as the problem from a few years back with the Xerox machines that would alter the text of copies: http://www.dkriesel.com/en/blog/2013/0802_xerox-workcentres_are_switching_written_numbers_when_scanning http://www.dkriesel.com/en/blog/2013/0802_xerox-workcentres_... https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/08/confused-photocopiers-randomly-rewriting-scanned-documents/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/08/confu...
- BenjiWiebe 9y agoWell, if medications had more unique names wouldn't hurt either. Two separate antidepressants: Escitalopram and Citalopram. And pronounced, they sound almost the same as well.
- chimeracoder 9y ago> Well, if medications had more unique names wouldn't hurt either. Two separate antidepressants: Escitalopram and Citalopram. And pronounced, they sound almost the same as well. The names only sound confusingly similar to people unfamiliar with them - for physicians and pharmacists, it's rare to confuse them. The similarity in the names is actually intentional and a feature. For example, erythromycin and azithromycin have the same suffix and similar prefixes, which is an indicator that, not only do they belong to the same class, but one is a derivative of the other. It's been a while since I studied this, but based on the names alone, I would be willing to bet that Escitalopram is an S-enantiomer of Citalopram - ie, a mirror image of the drug (or an isolation of one of the two mirror images present in the latter). If you say it out loud, it's almost a mnemonic pun. I could also guess that's an SSRI based on the "pram" suffix, though admittedly you made that easier by mentioning it was an antidepressant in the first place. INN names (like citalopram) are actually incredibly well-designed for the intended user (a pharmacist or physician, not a patient). I wish engineering terms had the same level of consistency. Edit: Turns out I was right. Both are SSRIs, and the former is the S-enantiomer of the latter.
- clebio 9y agoe.g. learn Latin. Or Greek. Or whatever it is that 10 fking years in med school actually gives SMEs in that field. Autoincorrect isn't an expert system, and it's behaving like one. Thank you for the detailed example.
- rspeer 9y agoIt's not Latin or Greek, it's specifically designed technical terminology.
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- crooked-v 9y agoI wonder how many people have already received the wrong drugs because of this.
- dboreham 9y agoAutocorrect is one reason why I am certain we won’t have working self driving cars any time soon. Once I see typing correction that’s better than useless, then I’ll know to look out for driverless cars outside of the Bay Area..
- emerged 9y agoThat feels true until you imagine plucking a random real life human driver off the street and paying them to act as your own personal auto correcter. Same or worse results and yet they make it to work without a wreck on most days.
- AlotOfReading 9y agoThis is literally what a publishing editor does. They're a lot better than autocorrect if my experience is anything to go by.
- astura 9y agoYou're totally missing the comparison. The majority of humans drive, hence "random person off the street." Youre talking about a trained professional, the majority of randos aren't randomly spell checking and copy editing documents. The majority of randos are driving, not just highly trained NASCAR drivers. A very large percentage of driver have no business driving, they will give a driver's license to anyone with a pulse and even people who have no driver's licenses are all over the road. They don't care, drive drunk, tired, half blind, with medical conditions, or otherwise seriously impaired. People would routinely come through my drive thru drunk and stoned, slurring, and barely comprehensible when I worked at BK. You haven't seen dangerous until you've seen someone with bipolar disorder drive while manic. Youre talking about a trained professional, the majority of randos aren't randomly spell checking documents. So self driving cars have to be better than your average driver not a professional driver. Which, frankly, is a pretty low bar.
- panic 9y agoI've never understood why autocorrect is enabled by default on Macs, which have precise, physical keyboards.
- brianpan 9y agoThe answer is imprecise, erroneous humans.
- adjkant 9y agoAutocorrect is a huge feature for most users, myself included. I have bad typing, and it's often much faster than looking something up in the dictionary. For every miscorrect it get's dozens right.
- raverbashing 9y ago"it gets" I wonder how many common mistakes are due to autocorrect failing to do its (its, NOT it's - like my phone just "autocorrected" me even when I typed i-t-s) job.
- 9y ago
- raverbashing 9y agoOh, in a desktop computer that's even worse It could autocorrect minor mistakes but not whole words
- daveFNbuck 9y agofluoxetine -> duloxetine is a minor mistake. It's just swapping lu to ul and typing d instead of f. These are very common typos.
- ztjio 9y agoTired of people blaming machines for working as designed when they have full control over the behaviors they are complaining about. It's a single checkbox in the system prefs to disable this system wide by default. These are supposedly professionals. They should be professional with all their tools or hire professionals that can proxy that liability for them. In other words, this is 100% a fault in the hands of the users in the supposed problem case. Now, all that said, I'd not be sad at all if this resulted in Apple disabling this feature by default. I always have to disable it on every mac as it drives me nuts. I type quickly so I never see the autocorrection popup.
- rockinghigh 9y agoPeople are blaming developers for bugs that could cost lives. That autocorrect is really annoying.
- csydas 9y agoI do get the frustration on this, but the auto-correct is pretty simple to "correct" in cases where it got over-zealous. I noted this elsewhere in the thread, but my last name is one letter off from that of a fabric and it has on occasion when I wasn't looking or paying attention, it altered my name on airline websites. This was an annoyance, and for a long time I was just super annoyed with it until I decided "there has to be a way to fix this", and there was. It was a simple double-tap on the trackpad "Learn Spelling", and it was done. I type pretty quickly too, but I'm also pretty persistent in watching what I'm doing and catch the lines as they appear. I the case of the article, there's an association now on the Mac between the two words, which I'm pretty sure that "Learn spelling" will override. But by default if it hits a word it doesn't know and doesn't know what it could possibly be, it just leaves it as a red line.
- pygy_ 9y agoYou need to be aware there's a problem to begin with. I didn't know auto-correct was enabled by default on macOS, and would never have noticed that the OS was changing what I was typing without notifying me.
- jmiserez 9y ago
- beardyw 9y agoI am baffled by some of the twitter responses. If a real person were crossing out one drug and writing in another would people be rushing to their defence? Here is a good rule: It is never right that a computer should do the wrong thing. It may be explicable, it may be avoidable, it may be correctable but if it is wrong it is wrong. We will be living in a world where computers are increasingly autonomous in their actions. Defending their behaviour now sets a dangerous precedent. Will the same people be blaming victims of self driving cars? So whoever added drugs to the spell checker didn't think it through properly. They need to be told to take them out or put them all in and keep them updated. If we work around things it is us who will become the servants.
- esolyt 9y agoHonestly, it's been a while since our partisanship has spread to arguments about tech. It never suprises me to see people are going to extreme lengths to defend Apple, even when it's a life and death situation. "Re check your work before you click submit or send. Don't place blame on Apple." "It’s pretty easy for a sysadmin to disable autocorrect" Educated people aren't immune from this effect either.
- walshemj 9y agoand a mistake in a prescription script can have life changing circumstances
- falsedan 9y agoI agree. The ridiculous lack of empathy is egregious: it’s easy to whitelist a word (for me based on the single example given in the tweet and ignoring the hideous number of trade names for pharmaceuticals); any competent sysadmin could disable it on the network/is the master image (since I could and I have no experience with the administration or staffing of a medical business so I assume they have plenty of budget available for IT busiwork). You don’t need to be working at a VC-backed company in the valley to be a tech-bro.
- kranner 9y agoMost medical businesses I'm familiar with (having a lot of doctors in the family) have no professional sysadmins and definitely no master images.
- INTPenis 9y agoWow this debate is funny. Imho the blame is solely with the user. To rely on your phone for autocorrecting difficult medication brands and then blame the phone manufacturer when it doesn't work is really a 1st world problem. I'm not saying that Apple is unable to remedy this situation. I'm just saying the users are unrealistic in belieiving that Apple has thought of this situation beforehand and made any changes to aide in the autocorrecting of medicine brands. Because they are brand names. And there are thousands of them.
- TheRealPomax 9y agoWhy? Apple has been in the business of automating daily tasks on the iphone for a decade now, holding them to account when it comes to when autocorrect could lead to a person's death, and when it is trivially innocent, is at this point perfectly fair. There are thousands of brands, so having a cherry-picked list of just a few of them preinstalled in the dictionary is something anyone who specialises in autocorrect (say: someone who's worked on it for 10 years and has run into virtually every edge case loads of times by now) knows you should not be doing. Instead of having autocorrect kick in at all, it should simply go "I do not know this word", so that the blame does lie with the user when they tell the phone to add their medication to the dictionary.
- kalleboo 9y agoThis is on a desktop/laptop not a phone. macOS also does autocorrect by default
- stordoff 9y agoThey aren't brand names (e.g. if you wanted the brand name for duloxetine, you'd probably want "Cymbalta"), they are the actual name of the drug. Further, the Twitter link specifically mentions MacBooks, not phones. "Correcting" a correct word to a different one can _solely_ be blamed on Apple - the user might not even know that the OS does autocorrections, so can hardly be blamed for the system silently changing something they typed correctly (at most you can say they should proof-read the statement). It's an understandable issue, but an issue nonetheless. Especially on desktop, it seems like an easy problem to avoid - just prompt the user that there may be a mistake rather than changing it without their knowledge.
- crazygringo 9y agoI would assume there are medical regulations that x-ray images, for example, can't be stored as blocky JPEG's. It seems like there should also be a medical regulation that input devices used in a medical setting should have autocorrect turned off. It's useful for e-mailing your mother, but obviously not in medicine. There are all sorts of regulations licensed medical practices need to follow, or which medical devices have to follow, which the rest of us don't have to. (Similar to aviation, for example.) Sounds like this is a good candidate for another, no?
- Asmod4n 9y agoAutocorrect gets it data from all iOS/macOS users, so "just" a few million ppl have to correct it back so it changes for everybody :/
- shiven 9y agoWhy isn’t some abulance chaser on it already? Seriously, proving loss due to something like this should be not too difficult. There is money to be made here - with the ancillary end result being Apple loses, what little position it has, in the point-of-care market.