How To Read A Medical Doctors Prescription

Medical Prescription

You will hardly leave a medical doctor office without a medical prescription. A medical prescription is a written note or instructions from a medical doctor to a health care provider in the hospital on what the patient condition is and what the others should do to find a lasting solutions.

Ability to write a medical prescription is an art that must be learn by medical doctors. The ability to interpret by other health care providers is a requirement.

Pharmacist are one of the major health providers that get to see prescription from patients all the time. A visit to the hospital is hardly complete without a visit to the hospital pharmacy unit. A medical doctor has the power to send you to various units within the hospital to have a better diagnosis. Getting the diagnosis right leads to getting proper treatment which most of the time require a drug for that.

Doctors have, over time learn how to master medical terminologies of other units in other to have an effective communication about a patient’s health and diagnosis. This, known as a prescription or instruction is directed at a particular medical personnel who must interpret the terms used in other to achieve a better diagnosis.

How To Read A Medical Prescription

Here, in this case, the prescriber is a medical doctor while the dispenser is a pharmacist. These drug information are written in codes that seem difficult to understand by the common person. This is worse by the bad handwritten of most prescribers. Well, in this article, we shall see some of those medical formulas and how to read them in a clear manner.

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Information On Medical Prescription

The information scribbled on a patient medical card can be divided into demographic, diagnosis and treatment with the prescribers’ information.

Demography: The person in charge normally enters this information on the medical card in the medical card unit. They gather such information in other to enhance the diagnosis by the doctor. Such information includes name, age, gender, vital signs, etc.

Date: This is very crucial as well as important for the various reasons:

1. The date makes it easy to locate the medical card on a future visit.
2. It helps to prevent drug misuse in the sense that some drugs are not to be taken more than a period.
3. The vital signs help the doctor in diagnosis.

Glancing through the medical card with a date can help a doctor save the patient from further consumption of such drug.

Diagnosis: This is the signs and symptoms, which in the most case starts with the letter cc, which means chief complain. CC details all the feelings the patient have and use it to predict the medical condition suspected. In most cases, the suspected may be up to three with a treatment plan for the most suspected or the most suspected.

Rx: This can be said to be an action plan for all staffs to take to achieve a proper diagnosis. It ranges from test, admission, drugs etc. however, let me discuss the aspect that I can talk better on; drug.

Drug Prescribed

In drug prescribing, there are many abbreviations, which are acceptable. That is why all pharmacy must know them. Take the following example as a prescription from a doctor. It may seem strange because the once from doctors are not type hence may look different.

Tab pcm 500 mg II tds 2/52 po

Or

Syr pcm 10 ml tid 2/52 po

Here is the general information in the prescription above:

Dosage From: The first information in the prescription is the form the drug should be dispensed. That is if the drug should be dispensed in the form of tablet, syrup, or injection. Below is some abbreviation of dosage forms in prescription:

• Tab for tablet
• Cap for capsule
• Capl for caplet
• Syr for syrup
• Inj for injection
• Gutt for drop
• OCC for cream
• Etc.

Note that gutt or gtt is use for ear drops and occ interpreted as occular is use for eye drops in Nigeria. Most medical abbreviations are the same worldwide with slight variations.
Generic: This is the name of the active ingredient or API. The prescription recommended by World Health Organisation (W.H.O) allows the prescription of an active drug and not a brand name. This way the cheap popularity of a friend’s product will not be pushed into the hands of the public.

This is only neglected when the drug is of a nature that different product of the same active has different actions on the same individual. Now let us look at the prescription above once more. The word there as PCM simply means paracetamol.

In other cases, the full name of the drug may be scribbled on the card. As you all know, paracetamol is not tied to any company label. It can be the one produced by emzor or M&B.

Dosage strength: This quantity should be taken at a given time. This may be in form of g or ml depending on the dosage form. Lets us still go back to our earlier example.

The dosage strength there is 500 mg of the drug. However a closer look at the order, we will notice an attached II at the front of the 500 mg. This simply means that 500 mg of paracetamol should be double. In essence, the full prescribed dose is 1000 mg.

If the paracetamol dispense is labelled 1000 mg or 1 g, it means that we are to take one tablet of that one. If it is 500 mg or 0.5 g, it also means we are to combine two of the 500 mg tablet at once. Since this is not found in the other prescription, the patient can go ahead without calculation.

In other cases, it is in ml where the instruction will be something like taking 5 ml or one teaspoonful. Teaspoonful and tablespoon have standard volumes which can also be used.

It should be noted that some drugs come in different strength e.g. Tramadol has 50 mg, 100 mg and 200 mg. If a medical doctor should prescribe for a patient 100 mg and the pharmacist gave 50 mg, the patient must double the tablet to achieve the correct dose.

Read Also: Drug Information Patient Should Know In Their Drug Leaflet

Frequency: The next coded information is how often the drug should be taken. The example at the top shows that the drug should be taken three times daily. This is indicated in the letter TDS, which is a Latin word meaning three times daily. That means the drug ought to be taken one in the morning, one in the afternoon and last one in the evening. There is still another coding, which is term medical abbreviations. Some few examples below are:

1. B.d means two times daily- morning and evening
2. Nocte means night time or before bedtime
3. T.i.d also means three times daily
4. Etc.

Duration: Some patients are expected to finish their dosage in a couple of days while others may be up to two weeks. With an instruction, the pharmacist will be able to calculate the quantity of the drug to give that it serves the patient for that time of therapy.

The 2/52 shown there can be deduced from the 52 weeks in a year. That means the two at the top is two weeks. This is it. The patient will take the drug for two weeks. Other examples are; 3/7 means seven days make one week and the drug is to be taken 3 days of seven days.

Route Of Administration: Note that not all drugs are taken through the mouth as the example above signified when it stated PO meaning per oral. Others are injection, sublingual, topical etc.
Now let me break down the prescription proper. The tablet of paracetamol should be given to the patient. The patient should take 1000 mg in the morning, afternoon and evening through the oral route. The duration of the treatment is for two weeks.

If a pharmacist is to dispense this medication, a tablet of 500 mg will amount to 42 tablets while the number will reduce if the tablet is in the form of 1000 mg by half.

Examples Of Medical Prescription

Here is an example of a typical prescription;

Tab PCM 500mg tid ³/7

Tab PCM 1g tid ⁴/52

Syr PCM 5ml bd ³/7

Gutt ciprofloxacin II drops tid ¹/12

OCC ciprofloxacin I drop qid ¹/13

Ventolin 2puff prn

Cap doxycycline 100mg II stat, then I daily

Cap doxycycline 200mg stat, then I daily

The example above is a simplified version. More complex prescriptions contain other more complicate medical jargons. Although this work is just to give intern pharmacist an idea of what prescription writing is all about.

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