Intramuscular or Intralipomatous Injections?

Abstract

VIEWING routine computerized-tomography (CT) scans of the pelvis suggests that in a North American population the majority of injections intended to be intramuscular are actually delivered into fat.To confirm or refute this impression we studied the thickness of gluteal fat in a hospital population. We found that few female patients and under 15 per cent of male patients do in fact receive an intramuscular injection when a needle of the usual size is inserted into the buttocks. The implications of this finding are discussed below.MethodsTo learn where the needle is introduced in intramuscular injections, we observed both . . .