Ode to the Prescription Pad

October 2026 | Vol. 70, No. 3
By Joseph Zawisza, DO, PCOM '05

Thou pad a story great doth tell
Thine pages speak the doctor’s will
To help thy patient to be well
Few marks on thee fix most all ill

Archaic now the paper and pen
Functions better suited to EMR
To cyberspace goes our consumer’s health
No longer QOD, MSO4, and PRN
Type, search, point, click must be safer
But surely cause loss of providers’ knowledge wealth

Growing up as the child of an osteopathic physician has its perks, but it has its costs too. One of the things that always paradoxically amazed and frustrated me about my father growing up was the demands of other people for his time. After all, he was (and still is) MY dad. We’d see someone in the store who just wanted to ask him a quick question. At a soccer game, he might only see one of my kicks with one eye because the other was on a patient who just didn’t feel well. And getting out of church every Saturday evening, well, that was just a fiasco. Sometimes I thought we’d be there until Sunday morning.          

However, I came to realize, like all of you reading this, that people don’t stop getting sick because it’s five o’clock, or because it’s the weekend, or even on Christmas. I also learned very quickly that my father’s profession was really a vocation, a very special one, that demanded that I be willing to share him with others. As an osteopathic physician and a father myself now, I have a tremendous appreciation for how hard my father worked to fulfill both roles without ever making either his children or his patients feel like they didn’t matter.

But what really impressed me from the earliest that I can remember, is the way that my father would pull a fancy notepad out of his back pocket after one of these encounters, write something down, give it to the person, and they would walk away with a sense of relief and maybe even a smile. Seemingly every time. I never knew, of course, what he had written, but that didn’t stop me from carrying around my own notepad sometimes and scribbling nonsense on it before giving it to my pretend patient so that they would walk away smiling too.

I was fortunate enough to have a parent, two parents really, who were superheroes. And the cape that my father wore was not his lab coat, but that prescription pad that he carried around with him – EVERYWHERE. I can remember times where we left the house and my father forgot his keys, which didn’t get us very far, and times when we were halfway to our vacation destination and he realized he didn’t have his wallet. But he never forgot that prescription pad. Truly, this object must have had some magical power, I thought. Humorously, my mother’s superpower, as a pharmacist, was deciphering the magical code on that prescription pad, among all the other things she did for us!