Q. A few weeks ago, you wrote, “You as the patient have the ultimate responsibility for quality control” of your prescription.
That’s so wrong! I can’t read the doctor’s scribble, and besides it’s usually in Latin. If we can’t read it, we can hardly be responsible for knowing if the drug is correct.
A. If you don’t want to take the wrong medication, you may need to step in at the very beginning of this process. Tell your doctor you want a prescription you can read, and that you need to know how to take it. Write his instructions down, so you can check them against what’s written on the prescription bottle you get at the pharmacy.
Medical educators maintain that there’s no excuse for illegible prescriptions and Latin abbreviations. It shouldn’t take more than a minute for a doctor to print a prescription legibly in English. If it does, perhaps he or she should use a computer instead of a prescription pad.
