Medical prescription

"Doctor's orders" and "℞" redirect here. For other uses, see Doctor's orders (disambiguation) and Rx (disambiguation).

A prescription in the medical context, often abbreviated ℞ or Rx, is a formal communication from physicians or other registered healthcare professionals to a pharmacist, authorizing them to dispense a specific prescription drug for a specific patient. Historically, it was a physician's instruction to an apothecary listing the materials to be compounded into a treatment—the symbol ℞ (a capital letter R, crossed to indicate abbreviation) comes from the first word of a medieval prescription, Latin recipe (lit. 'take thou'), that gave the list of the materials to be compounded. Requirements for content, who may prescribe, and how prescriptions are transmitted vary by country; many jurisdictions use electronic prescribing systems.

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