Doctor's handwriting on prescriptions: secret code?

Doctors’ handwriting on prescriptions is notoriously bad. Sometimes they fill out the patient’s name and the drug name with what looks like a scribble. For something as important as a prescription, you would think legibility would be important.

The really weird thing is that the pharmacies can actually read the squiggles. This leads me to wonder: maybe it’s actually secret code that only the doctor and pharmacist understand. That way an ordinary person couldn’t walk into a drugstore with a fake prescription, because he wouldn’t know the secret codes.

I know this sounds off-the-wall, but what other explanation is there as to how the pharmacy can read the prescriptions?

What a wonderful world we live in, to have a search feature.

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