A statement for discussion

June 22, 2015 • 8:50 am

by Matthew Cobb

I saw this today, and wondered what readers thought. Chip in below.

I do not know where family doctors acquired illegibly perplexing handwriting; nevertheless, extraordinary pharmaceutical intellectuality counterbalancing indecipherability trancendentalizes intercommunication’s incomprehensibleness.

79 thoughts on “A statement for discussion”

  2. Remarkably pellucid and grandiloquent…

    But without wishing to panegryze this overly, I would ask the question – ‘Why use a long word, when a diminutive one would suffice?’

    2. “extraordinary pharmaceutical intellectuality”

      “Remarkably pellucid and grandiloquent” ?? I beg to differ.

  3. It does seem to be one of nature’s deepest laws that doctor’s handwriting – at least on prescription pads – is completely illegible, except to pharmacists.

        1. I am concerned about the apparent, tacit, approval for pharmacists in this thread. Pharmacism is now an increasing phenomenon and no longer just confined to alt-health nuts. Pharmaphobia will prevent us from taking prescribed drugs, and silence the free speech of doctors and other health professionals. Can we have less of this insidious hate speech please?

  4. Increasing letter-count is a nice touch.

    My father was a doctor (GP), and the sheer amount of information recording required one to be very fast at noting things down. He ended up drawing the ‘shape’ of words, rather than going to the lengths of forming each letter correctly. And as all the local pharmacists knew (and could accurately interpret) his handwriting, it made it almost impossible for forged prescriptions to pass them by.

      1. Yes, and up to 20 letters in the final word!

        The increasingly larger words seem to me the entire point of the statement, with clarity and style being forced right out the window. Yet judging from the comments here, most readers engaged more with the message.

  5. I think the person who posted it, was writing it half jokingly, but saying something that’s pretty true, for those who have ever worked in a pharmacy.

    I use to work as a pharmacy tech back in HS, and I was always amazed by our pharmacist ability to read a doctor’s chicken scratch. Sometimes only a letter or so would be legible for a very long drug name. But our pharmacist was able to peer into the doctor’s mind, and know what drug they were requesting, along with the directions.

    1. “I think the person who posted it, was writing it half jokingly”

      Noooooooooo!

      😉

      1. They are all online now, straight from the doctor to my preferred pharmacy; I never see them.

        1. Mine are a mixture. Most are done electronically. Others are by hand.
          Its a wonder that the pharmacist does not get it wrong.

          1. I still get some handwritten prescriptions, though most are electronic. The paragraph is obviously a joke, and a good one; but like all good jokes, it contains truth. A few years ago, I came close to changing doctors because of this problem. I was very afraid I was going to get a wrong prescription.

  7. I figured that when a pharmacist couldn’t decipher the chicken scratch they just called the doctor’s office and had the receptionist translate Wigglyline to English.

      1. It would be a neat trick to continue the sentence (or add a second sentence) with an incremental reduction of letters for each additional word back all the way down to one. (It might be necessary to stop at two if the thing is to make sense).

        There’s a new challenge!

      2. This bunch of words that I am now putting down is also unusual. Do you know why? Think about it . . .

  9. I do not know, but I assume this is what you see when you look up the meaning of “nonplussed.”

  11. Apparently that’s a rhopalic sentence (or snowball if you prefer) from Dmitri Borgmann, Language on Vacation: An Olio of Orthographical Oddities. Scribner, 1965

  12. When my daughter was 20, I was able to read the postcards she did send from holidays. Now she is a doctor 41 years old, and I scrutinize her indecipherable postcards with a deepening despondency. Why, oh why I am not a pharmacist?

  14. I am a DDS. I got a chuckle from this post.
    I have been practicing for 42 years. I now am semi-retired and limit my practice to emergency care. This means that I write a Rx for every patient. I’ve noticed over the years I’ve become lazy in my penmanship. When I was young, I think my signature was quite legible. Now I’m to the point where it’s my first initial and a scribble line. However, my Rx also has a line where my name is in print, which probably has contributed to my signature evolving into what it is now.
    Anyway, just one doc’s opinion.

  16. Translation: being good at drugs makes up for having crappy writing, which is all greater than the need for outsiders to understand a word two family doctors are saying. Or writing, as the case may be.

    I understood it. It just required reading slowly and figuring out what went where.

  17. I haven’t seen a handwritten prescription in ages.

    Prescriptions are called in to your pharmacist by clerks or assistants.

    My eye surgeon asked to see the filled prescriptions prior to surgery.

    Lots of things have changed in the last five years. When you go for surgery, you are magic-markered for the incision site while you are awake. Multiple people verify your identity and your reason for being there.

    1. I was in an ER a while back for what turned out to be pretty serious internal bleeding. Which hurts a lot, by the way. Between pain, painkillers and fatigue, because they wouldn’t let me sleep and I’d been there all night long, my mental acuity was terrible. And every single time they wanted to do something to me, they asked me my name and date of birth. And it was hard for me to remember those facts in my dazed state. What I remember clearly was an overwhelming desire to scream, “why don’t you write it down!”

  18. I tried sending this thru Babylon’s english to German Translator and got

    Ich weiß nicht, wo die Familie Ärzte erworbenen unleserlich, weil verwirrenden Handschrift; dennoch, außergewöhnliche pharmazeutische Intellektualität Gegengewicht indecipherability trancendentalizes kommunizierenden’s incomprehensibleness.

    but Google does better with

    Ich weiß nicht, wo Hausärzte erworben unleserlich verwirrende Handschrift; Dennoch trancendentalizes außergewöhnlichen Pharma Intellektualität Gegengewicht Unkenntlichkeit Zwischenverbindung der Unverständlichkeiten.

  19. I was extremely glad that my supervisor discovered how to use edit and notes in word before having to correct my thesis…previously you got handed back corrections that required a degree in cryptology rather than biology.

  21. I might have noticed the increasing letter count had the big words at the end not brought to mind my favorite single-word oxymoron: lexiphanic.

  22. I suspect it’s not that comprehensible by pharmacists after all — in the UK all prescriptions are now printed out, and the only handwriting the doctor applies is a signature.

  23. I now find I can’t even read my own handwriting, so rarely do we use it these days, and I’m not even a GP.

  24. I’m a family medicine doc. In medical school 25 years ago we took lots of notes. If college can be drinking out of a fire hose, medical school is like drinking with your mouth open and being towed behind a boat. I would empty a BIC pen weekly. That’s what happened to my handwriting. Now with EMR’s I rarely write Rx’s.

    1. I invented a shorthand, instead, with single symbols representing words and, in appropriate instances, subscripts and/or superscripts to represent phrases. That helped a lot. One student, in the class behind me, was interested enough to learn my shorthand, so she was also able to benefit from my notes and old tests.

      If b.i.d. can mean “twice a day”, lots of other things can be abbreviated, too. My symbolic style was more mathematical than Latin, though.

  25. I remember a cartoon which showed a pharmacist struggling to read a prescription and sighing in despair to the patient “This Doctor Smith’s writing!!! Oh well, on his head be it.”

  26. I think it would be funnier if it made more grammatical sense.

    It makes more sense to write “perplexingly illegible”.

    And in “pharmaceutical intellectuality”, “pharmaceutical” is not the right modifier. Intellectuality isn’t something produced by pharmaceuticals. It’s the pharmacists who demonstrate intellect by deciphering the MDs’ scribbles.

    And it should simply be “transcends”.

    And the prefix “inter-” is not necessary; it should just be “communication”.

    I think these attempts at generating humor by using extremely unnecessary, high-falutin’ language are better if they’re written well.

    2. Also transcendentalism means to make transcendental, which is not the same thing as to transcend, which is the implied meaning.

  27. I would like to read that comment written by a scribbling physician; now that would be intercommunication’s incomprehensibleness. Though we can all make words up…especially if we want to fudge with the letter count.

    I’m glad nowadays, any Rx’s I get are sent directly from the physician’s computer to the pharmacy. No deciphering skills needed.

    1. I’m surprised by this and many similar comments. I’ve *never* had anything other than a handwritten prescription, and didn’t even know that they had been computerized.

  29. My brain runs out of random access memory before I can determine whether that sentence makes any sense.

  30. ” They’re only words and words are what we use
    When we’ve got sod all to say.”
    Eric Bogle

  31. The odd word choice made me wonder if it was an acrostic, but I get nothing, at least from the first letter of each word. And then, the most questionable word is “intellectuality” in the context of deciphering sloppy handwriting. I’d go with “decryptography,” which is, admittedly, not yet a word, but more accurate imo.

  33. I caught the increasing thing, but as for the question:

    A friend of mine once hypothesized there was a somewhat corrolation between intelligence and messy handwriting – because one’s cognition outruns one’s motor skills, was the guess. Since physicians are (often) on the smart side …

    The confound is that physicians specifically are often harried and timepressed as well.

  34. I have always assumed that the illegibility was a form of ‘security by obscurity’ to limit the amount of prescription forgeries. One of the characteristics of a forged prescription is that the handwriting is ‘too good’.

  35. It is called a “Snowball”. I once won a dictionary in a BBC competition for the world’s longest snowball. I think it was 22 words long so I’m still World Champion. But it might have been 19 words in which case I’m not. I can’t really remember.

  36. Leaving the verbosity behind, reading doctor’s writing is a major problems for pharmacists. I am a registered pharmacist and have seen terrible writing and been berated by physicians when I called to find out what they had written. I have seen mistakes made because the wrong medication was dispensed because what was written looked like one medication when the doctor meant something else. The only upside to it all, having learned to read such writing, I am able to decipher old writing while doing genealogy.

  37. Promulgation of unnecessarily obfuscatory verbiage, conveyed orally or in script, is essentially a kabbalic language taught especially to physicians and pharmacists for sub rosa communication beneath the comprehension of hoi polloi patients. Illegible writing is a lagniappe sussed exclusively by these cognoscenti.

  41. “Incomprehensibleness”? That is NOT a word. ‘Incomprehensibility’, I think (though it doesn’t have quite enough letters).

    cr

  42. I cheated and “Googled” it. It is an unusual sentence because each word in the sentence is one letter longer than the word before it.

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