A mother took her crying baby to see the family doctor. Immediately, the doctor diagnosed the baby with earache and wrote a prescription for ear drops. In the directions he wrote: “Put two drops in right ear every four hours”. He abbreviated ‘right’ as an ‘R’ with a circle around it.
Days later, the mother returned to the doctor and complained that the baby still had an earache but his bottom was beginning to get quite greasy.
The doctor was sure that couldn’t be right and looked at the bottle of ear drops to see what had happened. When he saw the label, he immediately realised what had gone wrong. The pharmacist had typed the following instructions on the label: “Put two drops in R ear every four hours.”