Veda #36 : Ugly Handwriting

Day 36
"Why do most of doctors have a terrible non-human handwriting?"


You probably have ever gone to see a doctor, or at least go to pharmacy to take the medicine that prescribed for you. Take a look, or remember what it's like to see the prescription and the doctor's handwriting. It's so ugly and most of the time, it's not readable. But amazingly, the pharmachists were able to read and gave the right medicine prescribed, complete with the dosages. Why do most of the doctors have a completely unreadable handwriting?

Okay, so before you thought that they've been teached to write badly at medical school, doctors do not have bad handwriting, they just choose to write badly. This is not a conscious decision to confuse people, but an unintentional consequence of viewing other things as more important or urgent in the moment. In this case, the patient's health and other patient's health also, and the much more important is to putting all energy into diagnosis and treatment concerns.

This bad handwriting also has something to do with medical records and doctors not wishing their patients to be able to read the entries in theirs. The other and more interesting aspect is prescriptions and the era prior to the 1960s. Before that time there were both fewer stock prepared drugs and more custom compounded medicines, often using the doctor's favored remedies. The combination of poor handwriting, Latin and abbreviations of Latin kept the patient from knowing what exactly they were taking, and trying to make their own medication (that of course, will caused something unexpected to happen if they read it and interpreted it by themselves).

But a more simple fact that actually could be put into consideration,after all the years of taking notes quickly in medical school, the handwriting got messier and messier. :p
How did the pharmacist able to read this messy handwriting?it's simple, usually at the beginning of the sentences, there were actually 2-3 letters that are correct, the rest usually concluded by the pharmacist through year and years of learning medicine.