Can you read your doctor’s prescription?

The fabled “doctor’s prescription” in which an unreadable scribble of medications that sometimes only a local chemist could decipher, is all set to become history.

For some strange reason, the bad handwriting of doctors has become legendary and the butt of many jokes. There must have been occasions in every doctor’s life when a patient has turned up consuming a “wrong” medication due to an illegible prescription. I remember how a young woman with thyroid disorder who had been prescribed “Ciplar” to slow her rapid heart rate had landed up a month later with persistent nausea as she had been served “Ciplin” (an antibiotic) instead by the chemist.

The Medical Council of India has therefore mandated that doctors either hand over printed prescriptions or write them in capital letters from now on. This appears a wellintentioned move. It should therefore now be possible to read and understand a doctor’s prescription not just by the local chemist, but by his patients too. Kudos.

In their enthusiasm to change the prescribing habits of doctors, our regulators have gone a step further, and urged doctors to prescribe medications by their generic names rather than by their brand names. Generics versions indicating the chemical compound, such as aspirin, are usually cheaper than the commercially branded version (say Dispirin) marketed by a company, and can mean monetary saving for the patient.

This coin however has another side. Most pharmaceutical honchos confess in private that the quality of generics and branded medicines, although “officially” stated equal, are not really quite so. Mature readers should not find it hard to understand how the quality of both the generic and branded versions of the same compound manufactured and sold by one company, have different prices.

When treating serious patients, doctors usually prefer trusted brands of medicines, albeit some being costlier. Can he take chances while, for instance treating a critically sick patient of typhoid in shock, with a version and source of an antibiotic that he has not heard. Or if the patient was your kin, would you prefer that he used one from a reputed company, even if it was somewhat costlier?

Even in our present times when doctors have become the easiest available punching bag, let us not ignore what common sense suggests. There is hardly any doctor who does not want to see his patient get well and go back home and no doctor ever wants to have a patient die. You might ascribe monetary motives to him, but be clear, that he is far more passionately interested in your welfare than government servants or politicians or drug store owners. Should the prescription insistently be in generics, the doctor’s discretion in choosing a medicine would be replaced by that of a chemist’s or a hospital administrator’s. And the reason why a dispensing chemist, who is not really connected with the welfare of the patient, will choose a medicine from one company over another, does not have to be told. Does it?