What is Prescription?

What is Prescription?
Prescription means slip which is written by medical practitioners to guide the pharmacists or chemists to give particular medicine to the patients.

The prescription is generally hand written on a preprinted form.

It also bears name of the medical practitioners.

Both the chemists and practitioners are expert in their professions. When a patient is diagonised by the doctor, he gives him some treatment. If we have to define a prescription, it can be a hand written or printed form that contain information.

The name and address of the prescribing provider and any other legal requirement such as a registration number may be same on the prescription provided by same practitioners.

Only name of the patient will be unique.

Date is put on each prescription.

There is some time limit for the prescription.

There is some recipe of medicines to be taken.

Literally, "Recipe" means simply "Take...." and when a doctor writes a prescription beginning with "Rx", he or she is completing the command. This was probably originally directed at the pharmacist who needed to take a certain amount of each ingredient to compound the medicine, rather than at the patient who must "take" the medicine, in the sense of consuming it.

The word "prescription" can be decomposed into "pre" and "script" and literally means, "to write before" a drug can be prepared. Those within the industry will often call prescriptions simply "scripts".

Both pharmacists and physicians are regulated professions in most jurisdictions.

A prescription as a communications mechanism between them is also regulated and is a legal document.

Many brand name drugs have less expensive generic drug substitutes that are chemically equivalent.

Prescriptions will also contain instructions on whether the prescriber will allow the pharmacist to substitute a generic version of the drug. This is a two way communication.

In some jurisdictions, the preprinted prescription contains two signature lines: one line has "dispense as written" printed underneath; the other line has "substitution permitted" underneath. Some have a preprinted box "dispense as written" for the prescriber to check off (but this is easily checked off by anyone with access to the prescription). Other jurisdictions the protocol is for the prescriber to handwrite one of the following phrases: "dispense as written", "DAW", "brand necessary", "do not substitute", "no substitution", "medically necessary", "do not interchange"

As a guideline, pediatric prescriptions should include the age of the child if the patient is less than twelve and the age and months if less than five. (In general, including the age on the prescription is helpful.) In some jurisdictions, it may be a legal requirement to include the age of child on the prescription. Adding the weight of the child is also helpful.

Prescriptions often have a "label" box. When checked, pharmacist is instructed to label the medication.

A prescription often contains the dose of medicine to be taken. And side effects to a patient by any medicine is also taken into account.

A prescription describes the name of the disease and treatment given.

--
Dr Marwah