Doctors’ writing
I’m sure you’ve had this experience. You leave a doctor’s office with a prescription and a list of recommendations for you to follow but you have no idea what it says. I mean, what’s the point?
A few years ago, I was approached by a legal office in Ireland who specialize in medical insurance cases with an offer of translating Polish medical documentation into English. Over the past few years I’ve trudged my way through loads of medical documentation and loads of doctors’ handwriting. More often than not it was a tremendous challenge.
Doctors’ handwriting appears by and large illegible to anybody outside the medical profession. Once I asked a doctor to decipher his own writing and even he couldn’t do it. On another occasion I showed my brother, a physiotherapist with plenty of experience in reading doctors’ writing, a specimen of what I dealt with. He suggested the doctor must have been trying to make his dry pen work. To him it seemed just zigzagging. Looking at the text again made me think it was a real possibility.
After it occurred to me to put down my reflections about it, I googled the phrase “doctors’ handwriting” and looked into a couple of results from the top. Apparently, doctors across the globe are notorious for bad handwriting. They can’t be born that way, though. It must be made. So how on earth is it made?
One sure reason is the amount of paperwork doctors need to do, often with the conviction that no one will ever look at it again. Another reason could be that bad as this writing may look to a lay person, it’s perfectly legible to a fellow doctor so why bother. As a translator I’ve often had to rely on a friendly doctor’s help and it was amazing how much she was able to read from what looked like scribbles to me. Pharmacists don’t seem to have trouble reading prescriptions either. Look again at the message on the monitor in the picture above. Here’s a student pharmacist for you: “Your prescription is ready at the pharmacy.” […] This is no joke; it’s a daily occurrence.
However, sometimes a doctor’s note has to be very clearly understood. Like when it needs to be translated to another language. Translation is all about putting a meaning across to someone who doesn’t know the language of the original. But how can you make somebody understand what you can’t understand? Indeed, you can’t even make it out.
Any treatment is only as good as the diagnosis. Get a wrong diagnosis and you end up with a completely incorrect treatment. Likewise, any translation is only as good as the translator’s understanding of the original text. Unfortunately, doctors’ handwriting often renders all attempts at understanding the source text completely futile.
To address this problem, I’ve come up with a handful of ideas. Here are but a few. What if the public made an appeal to the medical community, held a campaign or something. ‘Dear doctors. Every word of yours is worth its weight in health so watch your writing.’ Another idea is to install speech recognition devices at healthcare facilities so doctors can dictate their notes to a machine. Far-fetched as this might seem, it does appear to be the here-and-now of note taking. Speech Recognition technology is already extensively used in other areas of life and sooner or later it is sure to make an advance into the field of healthcare. Or, finally, perhaps a font designed specially for doctors would be a solution. How about that!
