I have yet, in my entire lifetime, been able to decipher a single prescription any doctor has ever written for me. It’s chickenscratch and it seems to be pretty much universal. I’m sure some just naturally have bad handwriting, but certainly they can’t ALL have penmanship problems! It disturbs me to think that some doctors must actually FAKE bad handwriting!
I’ve heard of many cases of pharmacists misreading a 'script and end up giving patients medicine that kills them. Why on earth don’t doctors just print the name of the drug in big block letters? Takes maybe two seconds at the most.
And finally, how do pharmacists read those scribbles? Are there classes in pharmacy school devoted to deciphering doctors’ handwriting?
Part of the problem is the handwriting, but part is interpreting. A prescription uses certain latin-based abbreviations that would be meaningless to most patients. Thus something that is quite clearly “sig” or some such would be meaningless to us, but understandable to a pharmacist.
“East is east and west is west and if you take cranberries and stew them like applesauce they taste much more like prunes than rhubarb does.” – Marx
Very timely,puff, I just read in the paper about some lawsuits based on undecipherable perscriptions. Chucky is correct about the jargony and technical abv.‘s too. The article did state that some medical schools are seriously considering penmanship classes. I have experienced pharmacists calling the Doc and asking “what the heck is this?” One doc I had, a real old time small town type did print. My present Doc is also a ‘simple country doctor’ but his RX’s come out of his computer,sometimes he just zaps them straight to the pharmacy,sometimes to the mail order place we use. I just know that some day he is gonna look down my throat and turn to someone in a velour shirt and say " he’s dead, Jim’
“Pardon me while I have a strange interlude.”-Marx
It’s pretty serious stuff. I work for a publishing company in their business publishing division, which includes a number of magazines for pharmacists. One of them acutally has a monthly column where pharmacists from all over Canada submit some of the illegible prescriptions they get. It’s kind of scary- I can’t read any of them even after I know what’s supposed to be written.
My wife’s (female) OB/GYN has very neat handwriting on prescriptions.
My theory, because it is what happened to me (though I am not a doctor…), is that College and Medical School destroy handwriting. You finish high school with passable penmanship, and are forced to write furiously fast as you take notes. This causes your handwriting to become more and more illegible over time. Since Doctors attend school the longest, they can be expected to have the poorest handwriting.
Unfortunately, doctors routinely write so illegibly that even those key bits of information are indecipherable. Not all doctors have bad handwriting; I know of three (two of whom are women) whose orders can be read without getting a major headache.
A number “2” can be written to resemble a 5, a 7, or a 1. One doctor I know writes his twos and fives exactly the same. Did he mean 20 mg or 50 mg? Sometimes I can figure it out by the context (“He wouldn’t order 50 mg of Lasix on this patient. I’m sure he meant 20 mg”), but sometimes I have to call him to clarify. This infuriates him so I have to listen to a lengthy screaming hissy fit.
Some doctors have pages of standing orders so they don’t have to write out the same lengthy orders time and time again. All they have to do is check or circle the orders they wish to use. Unfortunately, they do this so sloppily that the nurse and pharmacist can’t tell which orders are checked or circled, and which are not.
I spend a great deal of time deciphering doctors’ writing. It takes practice, hard work, and a little talent. Often, we’ll group five or six nurses together to stare at a page of orders and help each other read it. (“Look, right here he made his capital D like this, so maybe this is a D, too.”) Sometimes the writing is easier to read if you hold the page upside down. (I am being completely serious.) Another trick is to hold the page very far away from your face and squint. Sometimes it helps to take little glances at it, then walk away for five minutes and try again.
To be fair, I know a few nurses who have bad handwriting (and these are almost invariably male nurses). Even so, they manage to write their verbal and telephone orders legibly enough for the pharmacist to translate them.
Perhaps the probelm isn’t that doctors have worse handwriting than most people, but that their’s is so necessary to read? I mean, how often do you need to decipher the penmanship of other people in your life? Letters, perhaps, but often when writing a letter, people take the time to think and write legibly (sp?). And probably many of those in professions where you are required to hand-write things (teachers, I expect) are required to take handwriting classes.
This is just a WAG, but it makes sense to me.
This makes me think of the opposite case, where engineers, architects, and designers etc., have excessively NEAT and relatively uniform handwriting. Perhaps it is just that doctors are known for writing like that and the young/new ones pick up the habit in imitation of their predecessors and superiors.
When I took drafting in high school we spent part of the course on handwriting. It was really finicky.
Made sense though, because you could theoretically be specifying a part that would make the difference not only between success and failure, but between success and delayed failure when it was being used in a stressed situation.
But then, doctors have the same motivation to get it right… Lazy I’d say. Seriously. Most doctors I’ve been to have had a real attitude problem.
I can’t tell you WHY doctors all seem to have horrible handwriting, but I know that most of them do. For about 3 months I had a long-term temp job at UIC’s medical school. The med students all had to fill out long evaluations at the end of each class. My job was to read and decipher them and type them up so that the amdministration would be able to tell what the hell they said.
Eight hours a day, 5 days a week, for three months I read future doctors’ handwriting. Maybe once a week I’d run into one that was written neatly.
This is completely true.
That job was near-impossible when I had a hangover, by the way.
Engineers have neat handwriting?
As an engineer, I can say my handwriting is not particularly neat. Of course I hardly do anything in cursive any more, anyway, thus it is a little neater, being in print.
I picked up this habit in college. Lots of note taking, where I had to write what the professor wrote on the board. They would write in print to be easily legible, and I sort of followed along unconsciously. Next thing I knew I was writing exclusively in print.
I tried cursive a couple months ago just out of curiousity, and forgot how to make a couple of the letters. Doh! No, don’t make me go back to 4th grade!
I remember the teacher giving me a whole letter grade reduction for printing my number four incorrectly just once on a blueprint I was working on for my final project (it’s supposed to be a perfect triangle closed at the top just like on your keyboard, I absentmindedly printed it like I was used to- like an upside-down lower case “h”). Grrr…
I’m glad I’m not a pharmacist; I don’t think I’d get much sleep living with the possibility that I may poison somebody with the wrong medication if I can’t read the doc’s scribbles.
when i was in first grade, my teacher (we’ll call her Mrs. Evilpsychomonster) told my mother i’ll never amount to anything because my handwriting is so poor.
she went on to say, if i was a boy, i could still grow up to be a doctor.
well, i just want the world to know…the reason i never amounted to anything has nothing to do with my handwriting!
I always assumed the doctors had the same class in med school we lawyer-types take in law school. A two-semester course in bad handwriting, taken in conjunction with the well documented course in language obfuscation. I excelled in both, having naturally bad handwriting (hey, Frieda got the hair!) and a tendancy to be eloquent and ofuscatory at the same time.
