Ambiguous and Dangerous Abbreviations article results in interesting comment

There’s a little blurb in the March 2012 issue of Pharmacy Times about the dangers of using inappropriate abbreviations in prescriptions. The author gives a couple of good examples where the use of abbreviations resulted in errors. I’ve seen my fair share of crappy handwriting and liberal use of abbreviations during my career, and I almost always read articles that talk about the problem. I find them interesting.

Anyway, there’s nothing particularly interesting about this article, but Mitch Fields, RPh left the following comment:

Well, yet another article re: dangerous and ambiguous “pharmacy” abbreviations in a pharmacy journal. I’ve seen dozens such articles over the past 30+ years, and they all suffer from the same problem: they don’t belong in the journals of practitioners who READ prescriptions, they belong in the journals of the practitioners who WRITE prescriptions!

That is one of the most logical things I’ve ever read. Mitch makes a great point.