Hey Doc, your handwriting is killing us.

One of the most fascinating things to me is prescription. You know that piece of paper with scribbles all over it that your doctor gives to you after your visit? Well, it’s not just scribbles because it actually contains vital information with regards to your health. While I swear that I cannot read or understand it, I find it very amusing that pharmacists and other medical practitioners can read it easily. You go to any drugstore, hand your prescription and they will read it as if it’s clearly written. Soon enough, they’ll give you medicines that are suppose to make you well or healthy.

But are you sure that they read it right? What if they are dead wrong? Chances are, you will be dead too.

According to a July 2006 report from the National Academies of Science’s Institute of Medicine (IOM), doctors’ sloppy handwriting kills more than 7,000 people annually. Preventable medication mistakes also injure more than 1.5 million Americans annually. And:

Many such errors result from unclear abbreviations and dosage indications and illegible writing on some of the 3.2 billion prescriptions written in the U.S. every year.

Certainly, there is nothing fascinating or amusing about that fact. It is disturbing to know that your prescription can actually harm you more than your disease. Instead of treatment, some of these prescriptions, no thanks to our doc’s handwriting, can cause us injury or even death.