Why the lousy penmanship? You KNOW that reading a prescription correctly is of the utmost importance to the pharmacist (never mind the patient! 
). So why make it a point of honour to write as illegibly as you can??
I consider the computer printing of prescriptions to be one of the milestone ‘inventions’ of the late 20th century. Now, at least, the only thing left for the pharmacist to grapple with is the physician’s signature! 
Whiskey Tango Foxtrot?
My guess is that this is the OP:
And I assume that the answer is that doctors do more writing throughout their lives than anybody else. Speed is important and nurses and pharmacists can understand those squiggles.
Do Mercotans even have fingers? It’s probably quite difficult to write legibly when one is slithering on the hull.
cornflakes has it, at least in my case. I spend a huge chunk of my day writing notes and orders, signing papers, and initialing labs. It’s very time-consuming. Our office is not at all modern (I work for the government, don’tcha know) so we don’t have electronic medical records, dictation, or electronic prescriptions. We’ve been promised them for years and years, but it has not been delivered.
I print. My handwriting, never good, worsens at high speed into complete illegibility. Sadly, so does my printing, but less so. My nurses and pharmacists (and I do tend to work with the same ones year after year) can pretty much recognize what I write, and if they can’t, they ask me.
Of the 7 physicians I directly supervise, 2 have beautiful handwriting, 1 has mostly legible penmanship, and 4 have significantly bad handwriting. 3 of them were ordered to take a handwriting course to make it better. So far it hasn’t helped much.
Of the two Nurse Practitioners, one has lovely penmanship, and the others is serviceable. Of the two Physician Assistants, ones is perfect, the other needs to be slapped and sterilized.
Part of the problem for many of us is that we write much slower than our thoughts are moving. Quite frankly at this stage in my career, it takes me seconds to figure out what needs to be documented, but minutes to document it. Meanwhile someone is pounding on my door about another emergency, I’m late for a meeting with the warden, and I’ve still got 50 abnormal lab reports to review, initial, and write orders on.
If I could dictate, or even keyboard it all into an electronic record, my life would be much easier.
I’m not sure what this is meant to be. If it was meant to be a factual question, I guess it’s been answered so I’ll close the thread.
bibliophage
moderator GQ