Doctors and their handwriting
Doctors are (in)famous for illegible handwriting. We see jokes and cartoons in the media about the unreadable handwriting of doctors, and this is a global problem. It surprises people when a doctor has good writing – and some even suspect if they are real doctors!
There is also a medical term for poor handwriting – dysgraphia. There are funny memes that attempt to decipher medical alphabets as though they are ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs! Some go to the next level and have even created an illegible computer font for use by doctors! While these light-hearted puns are amusing, the unfortunate reality is that they are often not an exaggeration.
“You may not be able to read a doctor’s handwriting and prescription, but you’ll notice his bills are neatly typewritten.”
Earl Wilson
Why do doctors have bad handwriting?
Doctors often reason – jokingly – that intelligent people have lousy handwriting because their brain works faster than their hand!
However, all doctors do not have bad handwriting. I have seen many doctors whose handwriting is quite good. Perhaps, the proportion of doctors with bad handwriting is similar to that of engineers, lawyers or any other professional group. However, doctors are in a profession where they constantly write something and hand it over to others, dozens of times in a day. Many people “read” their prescriptions. Similarly, if lawyers had to write and hand over for others to read, people would probably blame them too for bad handwriting.
Doctors tend to write in a hurry. They are usually busy.
Effect of illegible handwriting
There are various purported reasons and conspiracy theories for the unreadable handwriting of doctors. However, the fact is that poor writing will result in errors. The American Institute of Medicine (IoM) reported in the year 2000 that about 7000 deaths occur annually in the US due to poor handwriting.
Errors in prescription potentially pose a grave threat to the patient. In addition, they may invite legal trouble for the prescriber. While many countries and hospitals have switched to electronic health records (EHR) and computerized prescriptions to circumvent this problem, it is not economically feasible in resource-poor situations. There is also the issue of resistance to any ‘change.’ Moreover, it is not the priority of many hospital administrators and doctors too.
Studies have shown that errors are much less when doctors click to select medications on a screen, rather than write on a blank paper. A study found an astonishing 37 errors for every 100 paper prescriptions, versus around 7 per 100 for those who used electronic prescriptions.
“Think of a prescription as an operating table, and handwriting as the equivalent of surgical skills.”
X/Twitter
A prescription is one of the most significant therapeutic transactions between a physician and the patient. There are particular procedural necessities in the writing of a prescription. The erstwhile Medical Council of India recommended a specific format for medical prescriptions and has mandated to write the names of medicines in block letters. Recent notifications also require the mention of generic names of the medications along with brand names. T
What is your experience with the handwriting of doctors?