sig: tid & hs 3 gt od
Years ago, almost every patient who got a prescription from the doctor walked away mystified by cryptic Latin notations about the medication and how to use it.Patients had to know Latin and Latin abbreviations for prescription terms to decipher inscriptions like the one above. It means:
Label (sig is short for "signa," meaning label) the medicine container with these instructions for the patient to take: three times a day ("ter in die" is shortened to "tid") and at bedtime ("hora somni") 3 drops ("gutta" shortened to "gt") in the right eye ("oculus dexter," or "od").
Keeping patients in the dark once was part of the mystique of medicine and pharmacy: Let the patient think he or she is getting a secret formula. If the patient believes the medicine is powerful, it might work better.
Prescriptions were written entirely in Latin for centuries after written medication orders became popular in the 1400s. Efforts have been under way for years to kick Latin jargon out of prescription writing.
"Today, it is strongly recommended that prescription orders be written entirely in English. Abbreviations and empirical jargon, whether in Latin or English, should not be employed."
That advice appeared 25 years ago in one of the most famous drug textbooks, "The Pharmacological Basis of Therapeutics."
In 1994, the American Medical Association House of Delegates, the AMA's policymaking body, urged doctors to write prescriptions in plain English. Other groups have done the same.
Yet depending on the physician's age and preference, a modern prescription may contain many, few or no Latin ab-bre-vi-a-tions.
The rationale behind using plain English is simple: It is an added safeguard to prevent medication errors. With physicians' legendary poor handwriting, the notation "qd" ("quaque die," Latin for "every day") could easily be mistaken for "qid" ("quarter in die," or Latin for "four times a day").
Some authorities also are encouraging physicians to include the intended use of the drug on the prescription form as an added fail-safe mechanism.