Opinion Express View on prescriptions in all-caps: Doctor’s orders

An old joke goes like this: A young lover is unable to read a letter from his beloved because her handwriting is illegible. He takes the spider-trail-like scrawl to the local chemist, who promptly hands him medicine. After all, an ineligible cursive is the hallmark of prescriptions, not love letters. Now, thanks to a judgment by the Orissa High Court, there may be hope for the hapless millions who have struggled to make sense of their prescriptions.

The Court has directed Odisha’s health department to ensure that doctors write all prescriptions, post-mortem reports and other documentation in capital letters. Or at least in legible handwriting. Both the common man and the judiciary cannot comprehend the “zig-zag” of the doctors’ penmanship. There has been speculation about the reason for the scrawl. It has been attributed to the fact that doctors are often in a hurry, in overburdened public healthcare systems. Medical jargon is complicated and the possibility of errors when writing by hand — without spellcheck — is compounded. A cynical view is that poor handwriting is a strategy to keep medical knowledge out of reach in the age of Google.

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Beyond the punchlines, though, poor penmanship can have tragic consequences. The deaths and injuries caused by it led the Medical Council of India to issue multiple directives on ensuring prescriptions that do not require a graphology degree to decipher. Hopefully, the Orissa HC’s directive will have some effect. Increasing digitisation too can help avoid errors when it comes to prescriptions and reports — it is far easier to have a printout or even a cloud-based medical history with all prescriptions and reports than trying to make sense of the crisscrossed lines on a piece of paper. And it’s easier than trying to write in all caps, all the time. The only loss, of course, will be of jokes at doctors’ expense.