I don’t think I’ve ever received a prescription from a doctor that could be read by a normal literate human without difficulty, and a lot of them are completely illegible.
I have difficulty believing ALL doctors have the handwriting skills of a Parkinson’s sufferer, or that all of them care so little about their patients that they don’t care if they get the wrong medicine or the wrong dose.
If the purpose of the “Doctor scrawl” to make it so that patients can’t reproduce it to get drugs they aren’t supposed to get? Is there some way pharmacists can tell if it’s doctor-scrawl? If I steal a prescription pad and, using normal handwriting, write myself a prescription for some really snazzy painkiller, is there some clue a doctor puts in there that I would leave out that would get me caught?
Prescriptions aren’t written in plain English, they’re written in a mix of medical English and Latin abbreviations, and certain symbols. If you know what they mean, most of them that I’ve seen are legible enough. See here for some information.
The DEA number, if it’s not pre-printed on the pad, would be a huge give away. Also, I’ve heard that alot of pharmacies get to know the local doctors handwritting after a while.
Also, most of them won’t hesitate to call the doctors office and verify the script if they’re not sure. Back when I was on adderall, my doctor had me on a stupidly high dosage 2-10mg pills twice a day. That’s 120 CII pills I was asking for. Often they wouldn’t even have them in stock, but almost every time I could hear someone making the call to my doctor about it.
BTW this was in college around 1999-2000ish, and I only took one a day while I was on it. She prescribed me sooooo many I still have ALOT left over at my house. If I took 40mg a day I don’t think I would have slept during my entire sophmore or jounior year.
My nurse practioner prints out prescriptions on his computer to avoid the problem of unreadable handwriting. He then handsigns it, of course. More and more doctors are going to this. We just got a new prescription for my husband’s meds in the mail and it was printed out as well.
At one time, part of my job was to pick up prescriptions for the jail inmates. More than once we got an incorrect prescription due to unreadable handwriting. Fortunately, I caught it the one time it happened to me.
I asked my Doctor about this recently, wondering if it was deliberate or just because they scribble out a hundred of them a day. These days they’re printed via computer, but that’s relatively recent and not done 100% of the time.
Anyway, he said that the handwriting scrawl came from frantically scribbling down notes through 8 or more years of Medical School lectures, and that eventually his and his fellow students’ regular handwriting just got messy from that.
It seemed to make sense, though why this seems to be exclusive to Doctors doesn’t entirely satisfy me.
The infrequent occasions on which I am obliged to handwrite pupils’ reports (i.e. one rather idiosyncratic school) shows up how this has happened to me, along with the years of deterioration through never handwriting anything substantial. The difference is that I don’t have to let dozens of people see this to be the case every day.
My primary care doctor does not handwrite his prescriptions any longer. Instead, he types the prescription into his computer, and sends it electronically to my preferred pharmacy. I love this. Usually the medicine is ready for pickup by the time I get to the store.
My dentist prints out his prescriptions and then signs them. My psychiatrist hand writes the prescriptions, but he’s kind of old fashioned in some ways.
I think that electronic prescription writing will become the most commonly used method in those countries that have the infrastructure for it. There’s less of a chance of a screwup, plus patients won’t lose their prescriptions, and won’t have the chance to alter them, either.
Una, I gotta say, have you tried changing pharmacies? I had a drugstore that kept messing up with my medicine, and I changed stores.
Israeli perscription forms have a small barcode on the bottom. The pharmacist simply scans them, sees what I need, and hands it to me. It’s never taken me more than 60 seconds to have a perscription filled, and I’ve never had any mistakes.
I assume there’s some centralized computer network at work here, but I have no idea how it’s set up.
I used to think this way too, but 8 or more years of Engineering School lectures haven’t managed to significantly change my or my compatriots’ handwriting. I’m hard pressed to believe that their lectures are that much more information packed than ours.
Anyone want to shed light on the mystery as to why it takes Pharmacists a half an hour to fill a prescription? What is it about taking pills from the big bottle and putting them into a smaller one that takes so long?
I was a pharmacy tech many moons ago, over asummer while I was in high school. You come in and drop your prescription off. The guy at the counter isn’t a pharmacist: he puts the prescription in a queue for the actual pharmacist to check out. The pharmacist reviews the prescription and whatever records the pharmacy has on you. He’ll either okay it, or calls the doctor’s office to okay it (if he suspects something fishy). When it finally gets his approval, it gets put back in another queue for a second pharmacy tech to actually count out the pills. The pharmacist has to then go back, and recount what the tech has counted out, before sealing the bottle, printing up the directions, and letting you pick it up.
Over the course of the day, in addition to verifying and recounting all these pills, the pharmacist will be receiving calls from other patients who want advice or instruction on taking prescriptions, or explaining things to people picking up their scrips. He also has to review a massive amount of journals, reports and other data relating to new drugs.
It may only take 5 minutes, depending on what workload the pharmacist has to deal with. But they’ll always tell you a half hour or an hour (or whatever), because there’s only one pharmacist on duty per pharmacy, and each prescription has to go through his hands at least twice before it’s okay for you to pick up.
Why don’t American pharmacies sell pills in those metallic punch-out sheets (or whatever they’re called) in cardboard boxes? Makes more sense than counting out pills individually.
It isn’t that hard to count pills. There are special plastic trays that can be used to speed the process. It doesn’t take long. Some large pharmacies have automatic dispenser machines.
Sometimes they do. I’ve recently taken a couple of rounds of Z-Pack, which is six azithromycin tablets packaged on foil sheets. Very simple instructions, take two the first day, and one on each following day. None of this “three times a day” nonsense. I think that a better question might be “Why don’t manufacturers sell more foil packs to American pharmacies?”
I think it may have something to do with the fact that most perscription medicine sold in Israel is generic, while Americans tend to prefer name brands.
Can they do that with controlled substances? Last I checked controlled substances can only be filled if you have a written script in hand. Not only can the doctor not call in a script for say, Vicodin, they can’t even fax it in. (They can, however, mail it)
Wouldn’t that tend to work the other way? I would have expected the generics to be in the big bottles and the branded versions in the fancy packages.
My experience in the UK - where there is strong pressure for doctors to prescribe generics wherever possible - is that practically all drugs are in blister packs. I can’t rember when I last received a prescription medicine in a pharmacist’s bottle.
ETA Sometimes this leads to absurdities when the packs contain, say, 28 tablets and the doctor prescribes 30. The pharmacist has to cut 2 off the strip and shove it into the box of 28 :smack:
