Life Vitamins

A letter written to/by a doctor can be termed as a doctor letter. A medical letter or doctor letter could also refer to a letter written by a doctor to his patient, to an organization, to another doctor, or to a pathological laboratory. Alternatively, it could also refer to a letter written to a doctor by pharmaceutical companies, by a patient, by another doctor, or by a research organization.

Pharmaceutical companies keep in touch with doctors for business reasons. Such companies come out with new medicine brands from time to time. Obviously, they want to ensure that a specific brand launched by them and the specific medicine's effectiveness comes to the notice of doctors.

They then write letters to doctors (such as an MD) informing them about the new medicine brand launched by them. With the help of the medicine-related brochures enclosed with the doctor letters, the action and the effectiveness of the medicine is explained to them.

This interaction helps doctors to include the new brand in their prescriptions to patients. The patients buy the specific brand of medicine from chemist shops. Using this procedure pharmaceutical companies earn money.

Medical research organizations keep doctors updated with the state-of-the-art research done in specific areas of medicine or surgery. They do so through doctor letters.

Doctors sometimes get a biopsy conducted from a reputed pathology laboratory. They write a doctor letter to a pathological laboratory as a covering letter. The pathological laboratory replies back to the doctors concerned through a doctor letter. With the doctor letter, the laboratory encloses the biopsy report of a patient of the doctor.

A family doctor may refer a patient to a specialist doctor through a doctor letter. In the letter, the family doctor will generally include the case history of the patient, his observations about the patient, and why he is referring the patient to the specialist.

After the specialist doctor has examined the patient and conducted any further tests related to the patient, he will generally write back his findings to the family doctor through a doctor letter.

Doctors being busy people never type out the letters. They simply dictate them to their recording machines. Their secretaries forward the recordings to medical transcription companies. They transcribe them and resend them back to the doctors. They are then printed, the doctors sign the doctor letters, and they are mailed by their secretaries to the person or organization concerned.

A doctor letter also refers to a letter sometimes written by an angry doctor to a patient, who does not comply with the doctor's guidelines.