It's l0ong been known that doctors have notoriously bad hadnwriting and I always thought that this is one area where words should be clear and totally unambiguous. My mother often used to joke that I would be a dr as my hand was so bad.

However the reply to drs' bad hands was always that the pharmacists and/or nurses became used to their drs' hands and could easily decypher them. It doesn't help when there are often foreign-born drs in the hospitals, esp. those for whom Englisg is not first language.

A small example was years ago when, in one of my many jobs, I was training to be a radiographer. A man came from the AED (ER) with a wrist X-ray request, written by an asian dr. It said he'd hurt his wrist "dodging cars".

"Bloody-well servers him right," I thought. Of course, the practice is to confirm the request with the patient. It turned out he'd been on the dodgem cars, at a fairground, and a sudden spin of the wheel had twisted his wrist.

>We've had about 3,000 soldiers die in Iraq, and we've been over there several years. I think something even more disturbing is the fact that doctors are killing our defenseless citizens by much larger numbers. Here's a little story that gives more info:
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>http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1578074,00.html
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>If you are upset over deaths in Iraq, how about Drs?