Can you read Doctors' prescriptions?

I can read a little because I study midwifery and we need to read some doctors prescription when we are duty to clinic or hospital. Some of my friends asking what is the prescribe medicine of their doctor when they are need to buy med. Most of the doctors hand written is hard to understand and only in the medical field have the capacity to read. Most of the abbreviation words are using if they prescribe. Because it is they study for a long years. They studied hard for this different world of medicine.

I know what you mean it seems that no matter which doctor you go to see they always have the same unreadable handwriting so it is hard to figure out what the prescriptions are for,and sometimes I wonder how a pharmacist knows what the doctor has written when they are filling a prescription,and I sometimes wonder if a requirement for being a doctor is you have to have sloppy handwritten because if that is the case,I could definitely be a doctor lol,because my handwriting is so bad sometimes,that I can not even read what I write,and I end up asking my fiance or my parents what I wrote,which is definitely kind of funny,and the last time I went to my doctor for a cold,I found out that they are doing things differently everyone carries a laptop and they use those to keep up with the charts of their patients and they also use those to make the prescriptions and send them to the pharmacist via fax or email or something which saves paper,and saves having to keep up with the prescription without knowing what it says,and that way by the time you get to the pharmacist the prescription could already be filled instead of having to take it there and then wait twenty minutes or longer for them to fill,which wastes time especially if you have more important things to do,and I wonder if doctors will ever improve their handwriting or learn to write prescriptions so they are readable,or I wonder if all doctors will turn to computers to do prescriptions.

most of the time its not very clear handwriting. so i have problem in reading a doctor's prescription. but sometimes they are redable

I don't know if this is right or anything but when i was younger i asked my mom {and sometimes they just tel you something that is simple} why you can never read their hand writing and she said because in school they had to take so many notes that they would write really fast and messy and that's just how their hand writing is after medical school. My dad is a nurse and he has horrible hand writing also. Actually that sound's really ridiculous and i was laughing as i was typing it. Maybe it is true maybe it isn't but that's what i was told!

They looked like scribbling to me. I often wonder myself whether the nurse's on duty is giving me the right prescription. Out of curiosity, I did asked one nurse about this. My question was : can you understand what the Doctor writes? She answered yes cos they were taught to read in code.

its realy hard to understand what doctors have written on prescriptions.the amount of times i have taken one to the chemist and they have ended up haveing to call the hospital as not even they can understand it.even other doctors cant understand what another has written in the notes.when we go to the hospiatl and we see a different doctor i have to try and remember what was said at the last meeting and with seeing 6 different doctors with one set of notes is no fun at all.thats is the normal doctors are on.i think this year we have seen at least 10.in two different hospitals

I have never been able to read any of my doctors' handwriting. And the most recent prescription I got, about 3 weeks ago, I was thinking the exact same thing. And it is not like you always get the prescription filled by someone the doctor knows. Like the pharmicist may be in a whole different town or miles down the road. Maybe pharmicist and nurses have to take some kind of course on reading the handwriting on prescriptions from doctors. LOL Thanks for starting this interesting discussion, and have a great day!

its hard to even guess what they write... why do all docs have the same handwriting... i just cant understand even a single word...

Doctors are writing that way on purpose. I forgot what it is called but it is like their own little language/handwriting they learn how to write. This keeps people from messing with the prescriptions and writing fake ones.

i always have a hard time reading doctors' handwriting.. so i always ask them what's written on the prescription.. good thing, some doctors of this generation, have improved in their handwriting skills.. =)

Doctors usually have the worst hand writing. I hope i dont have to read doctors prescription that often but still i have never ever understood what doctors usually write and i wonder how the hell does the pharmacist understand that writing. It is almost impossible to read

I really can't understand the handwriting of many doctors,especially the elder ones.some of the young doctors' handwriting could be readable maybe.so,I always admire the nurses/staff of Pharmacy for their capacity of understanding.

Me too! I don't understand what my doctor writes on prescription. But the staff of pharmacy understands it pretty easily. I wonder how this is possible? But my doctor explains me the prescription to me. Thank God, i am surviving by that!

I can read some of them, but then again i am used to reading horrible handwriting!! From talking to nurses, pharmacists, ect.... they all provided me with similar responses (I had this question in the past myself) All thepople I have spoken to in the past told me the same thing, that you learn how to read it over time, and become used to reading the writing.

Hi there ganga472007! I used to have a difficult time reading the handwriting of doctors. I think that my job as a teacher has helped me understand even the worst handwriting. I have encountered a lot of bad handwriting -- worse than that of doctors and I have to do my best to understand such handwriting to be able to rate my students' working papers. I have noticed that the new generation of doctors have better handwriting. I have a lot of friends from grade school and high school who are now doctors and well, their handwriting is legible!

I have a hard time reading the prescriptions I've gotten from doctors as well. I have no idea how the pharmaceutical staff does it. Granted, there was one time just a few months ago, when the pharmacist couldn't read the exact dosage that the doctor had prescribed. It could have been one of two things... one was too little a dose, and the other seemed off a bit too. She gave me the option to wait to contact the doctor to get the right amount (that could take hours) or to okay her professional guess based on practice. I trusted her without much question. Pharmacists are more knowledgeable in that sort of thing than doctors are anyways.

not really. but some times i get some words, may be it is because i get familiarized with many medicines as my mother , mom all use a lot of medicines.

Its really hard to read the hand written prescription of most doctors. I don't understand why these doctors are writing very badly that hard to read. I am very impressed by the nurses and pharmacist that they can read and decipher what these doctors are writing in prescriptions.

Yeah its really very hard to read what doctors write in the prescriptions . I am a patient of ankylosing spondylitis . My doctor given me a prescription for the medicine and that was really hard to understand . It happened to me a lot of time. Even the pharmacist didn't get that sometimes.