A prescription (℞) is a health-care program implemented by a physician or other medical doctors in the form of instructions that govern the plan of care for an individual patient. Prescriptions may include orders to be performed by a patient, caretaker, nurse, pharmacist or other therapist. Commonly, the term prescription is used to mean an order to take certain medications. Prescriptions have legal implications, as they may indicate that the prescriber takes responsibility for the clinical care of the patient and in particular for monitoring efficacy and safety. As medications have increasingly become pre–packaged manufactured products and medical practice has become more complex, the scope of meaning of the term "prescription" has broadened to also include clinical assessments, laboratory tests, and imaging studies relevant to optimizing the safety or efficacy of medical treatment.

Prescriptions are handwritten on preprinted prescription forms that are assembled into pads, or alternatively printed onto similar forms using a computer printer or are in an electronic format. Preprinted on the form is text that identifies the document as a prescription, the name and address of the prescribing provider and any other legal requirement such as a registration number (e.g. DEA Number in the United States). Unique for each prescription is the name of the patient. In the United Kingdom and Ireland, the patient's name and address must also be recorded. Each prescription is dated and some jurisdictions may place a time limit on the prescription. There is the specific "recipe" of the medication and the directions for taking it.

Ben Michael Goldacre (born 1974) is a British science writer, doctor and psychiatrist. He is the author of The Guardian newspaper's Bad Science column and a book of the same title, published by Fourth Estate in September 2008.

Goldacre is the son of Australians Michael Goldacre, professor of public health at the University of Oxford, and the pop singer Susan Traynor, aka Noosha Fox, the nephew of science journalist Robyn Williams, and the great-great-grandson of Sir Henry Parkes.

Goldacre was educated at Magdalen College School, Oxford then studied medicine at Magdalen College, Oxford where he obtained a first class degree in his preclinical studies in 1995. While at Oxford he also edited the student magazine Isis. He was a visiting researcher in cognitive neuroscience at the University of Milan, working on fMRI brain scans of language and executive function, and then he went on to study clinical medicine at UCL Medical School and qualified as a medical doctor in 2000. He received a master's degree in philosophy (funded by the British Academy) from King's College London. He passed the MRCPsych Part II examinations in December 2005 and became a member of the Royal College of Psychiatrists. In 2008 he was a research fellow at the Institute of Psychiatry, King's College London. As of November 2009^[update], Goldacre is a psychiatric registrar and Guardian research fellow at Nuffield College, Oxford.