Let’s begin with a quiz question:
Patients may be allergic to:
A. oxygen
B. carbon
C. iodine
D. none of the above
If you answered anything but “D,” better keep reading.
Consider this scenario: If a patient is allergic to penicillin, you would document “penicillin” in the medical records. It would never occur to you to list “antibiotics” as an allergy, and you certainly would not call it a “carbon” allergy for slang, just because penicillin contains carbon.
This not an exercise in semantics, but a patient care issue. Iodine is a mineral we all need, intentionally added to our salt supply, so that people do not get iodine-deficiency goiters as they once did. (We could boost everyone’s protein intake by adding peanut powder to the salt supply, but people might understandably object.) So while some people may be allergic to compounds that happen to contain iodine, the iodine in the molecule is not the culprit.
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