"One pill three times a day"

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So apparently I've been taking my medications wrong. For 8 months I've been having psychotic symptoms and have not been getting better. When I visited my grandma she told me I was taking them wrong. Apparently "one pill three times a day" does not mean take all pills at once. I've been taking them the correct way for the last couple of days and I noticed my psychotic symptoms are less profound and I feel much better. I find the phrase "one pill three times a day" utterly confusing. There are so many ways to interpret this phrase. To make matters even more confusing, when I was at a hospital they gave me the pills all at once. Has anyone else experienced this confusion? Is this lack of common sense an asperger's thing? I'm not stupid, I just see many ways to interpret the phrase and just picked the most general one. Thanks.

It is a bit tricky, though I interpreted it correctly. A comma would probably help eliminate some confusion. In the future, if you find an ambiguous phrase like that with medication clarify it with whoever is prescribing medicine so you are both on the same page.

How else can you interpret that phrase? I mean, how did you or do others interpret it differently? Can anyone explain their train of thought?

The only way I can understand it is as follows: I read it as "one pill" and "three times", then automatically went over putting those together into "one pill three times" and "three times a day", where the 1 must refer to the pill (because if it didn't, I'm not sure what else it could refer to?) and the 3 to "times" (which I immediately noticed is a plural and while the number preceding a word doesn't necessarily serve as an elaboration/while it could be unrelated, the word "times" often is accompanied by a measure of quantity that specifies the number of times, in this case a numeral, three).

If you want the best effect, the levels of the medication need to be as constant as possible. Ideally, 8 hours apart- so for example 8am, 4pm and midnight.

Or 6am, 2pm, and 10pm.

I don't mean to speak for the OP, but I think I get it.

"(one pill three times) per day"

or, rewording it a bit:

"(one pill times three) per day"

I can see myself making that mistake, except that I've been on a lot of meds over the years and know what that prescription wording means to say. I'm not sure why those misreadings happen. I know that I have a lot of jokes come to my mind from deliberately misinterpreting things that people say. It's easy for me to see multiple interpretations for some reason. Maybe it has something to do with a loose grasp of context.