Ravioli Ravioli, give me the formuoli

Also me:

There are 3 main types, but from my research, this looks to be American Gregg Shorthand.

As you can see, there are set symbols for every letter.

Let’s break one of the words down:

Using the Gregg Alphabet as reference, we can see most of the letters in “atrophied” are present. But why no “o” vowel, and why is “ph” written as “f”?

Simple. In shorthand, you cut out all vowels in a word when writing it down, with the exception of words that BEGIN or END with a vowel (hence the “a” at the start being present), or like in the “i” in “atrophied”, to make it more readable when the sound could be harder to distinguish if it isn’t written. In “atrophied” if the the “i” isn’t written, it could be hard to tell if the writer meant a “fud”, “fad”, “fod” or “fid” sound, for example.

Also, since Shorthand is a phonetic writing system, you are encouraged to write down the phonetic sounds of words rather than the actual letter blends - in this case, write an “f” instead of a “ph”.

So in actuality, these aren’t just meaningless scribbles - it’s Gregg Shorthand, a writing system developed to take down notes more quickly than when written out in full, which is very useful in a medical or journalistic environment.

Some people can even write over 100 words in a minute! And, it’s been in use since John Robert Gregg invented it in 1888! Wow! So old!

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.