Even if doctors were using a formal shorthand system, it’s considered a bad practice in healthcare.
According to a recent study, in the US 250,000 deaths per year are due to medical errors, and there are even more mistakes that don’t result in deaths. Not all of these have to do with handwriting, there are tons of causes, but miscommunications of various forms are at least one major cause, and bad physician handwriting has specifically identified as a high risk issue, possibly responsible for 7000 deaths a year.
That’s why it’s considered best practice to write things out coherently and to have doctors do electronic charting and electronic prescribing if possible.
Shorthand is great for some things, like school notes or notes in an administrative setting, but a lot of times when doctors are doing it, they’re doing it just because they’re rushed and not being careful. It’s not a purposeful shorthand, trust me, it’s just their messy ass writing. Even if it was purposeful, it’s useless in communication with others outside their personal notes, like in prescriptions or charting.
That’s why this is very, very bad. It’s not a cool shorthand system in the medical context it’s being presented in here in this post. It’s a high risk behavior that can potentially kill someone, that many medical facilities train people to identify as dangerous.
I work in hospital pharmacy and everything has been moved to electronic prescribing, but even before it was, the pharmacists I worked with would make doctors rewrite orders if they were this bad. They refused to process them unless they were legible.
So just adding a medical perspective on top of this: healthcare professionals joke about this sometimes, but it’s actually not that funny, and there’s often a bit of mockery directed at doctors for doing it. It’s also not a cool language thing. People die because of it.
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