6 ms·
At least "receive" makes more sense for Rx than "prescription"
by hnuser123456 2y ago
At least "receive" makes more sense for Rx than "prescription"
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- derefr 2y agoRx actually stands for "recipe"! Which makes sense, if you remember that there used to not be such a thing as pre-compounded drugs. Rather, a prescription was literally a recipe a doctor would write out for you to give to your friendly neighbourhood compounding pharmacist, who would follow that recipe to produce a drug for you. Which in turn lends an interesting clarity to the traditional roles and competencies of "medical doctors" vs "pharmacists". In the 1800s, a trained doctor was someone who would be expected to come up with a — potentially de-novo! — drug formulation, on the spot, as a treatment for a patient; and a trained pharmacist is someone who would be expected to take your prescription, walk into a lab in the back of their shop, and come out having converted that — potentially never-before-encountered — drug formulation into something you could put in your mouth. If the active ingredient was something unusual, they would even be expected to synthesize it themselves! (Which explains why we used to call pharmacists "chemists". They were!)
- withinboredom 2y agoInterestingly, compounding pharmacists still exist. When my son was less than a year old, he needed some medicine, but there was nothing we could buy over the counter for his weight. So, the doctor literally wrote the recipe down and sent us to a compounding pharmacist across town.