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Comment by tryptophan | Hacker News Reader

>So for all the reasons above when any physician tries to suggest that a physician is the only “real doctor” you can roll your eyes and suggest they crack open a history book and then let them go back to stroking their own ego.

I think you are misunderstanding what their issue is. They aren't mad about people calling themselves 'doctors' in general society, but in a medical setting. You have nurses, PAs, chiropractors, naturopaths all calling themselves a 'doctor' in a medical setting, all trying to associate themselves with the rigor and expertise an MD would grant.

As to the origin of the title in a medical setting, you may be right, but it has been used that way for a long time now. Being pedantic about its usage isn't helpful when there are lots of bad actors trying to confuse people by referring to its commonly understood meaning.

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The parent common was surely taking about people with PhD or MD together on a room, both entitled to use the title "Dr" before their name, with MD half jokingly claiming that they're the "real" doctor. Most of their comment basically says so, plus they seem to be in the UK, where other professionals like nurses would never try to call themselves doctors.

Although, in my experience, it's more often the PhD owner claiming that the MD is the real doctor!

I think because in modern english, the common word you would use to differentiate a PhD vs MD is professor or scientist, while doctor nowadays means 'healer' usually.

We aren't the only language that has one word for multiple professions, like sensei means teacher OR medical doctor in japanese.

> the common word you would use [for] PhD is professor or scientist

Those are not common words for people possessing a PhD, and that's good because they are totally inappropriate words.

A PhD is a type of qualification (a very unusual one, in that it requires original contribution to knowledge rather than just learning existing knowledge, but it's a qualification nonetheless). "Professor", in total contrast, is essentially a job title. It's very possible for someone to have a PhD and not be a professor. The most common case is where a PhD holder has simply not stayed in acamedia at all; actually this probably describes the vast majority of PhD holders (by simple maths of the number of PhD students per academic). Even for people in academia there is typically a gap before you get the formal title professor (here in the UK it historically goes PhD student, postdoc, lecturer (the first one of these that is a permanent job), reader, professor; in the US it's a bit different and sometimes you have someone called "associate professor" but not be entitled to use the "Professor" as a title before their name, but there's still certainly a potential gap in the middle).

"Scientist" has many of the above problems but is less of a formal term so could maybe be slightly more widely used e.g. maybe a postdoc or someone working in certain types of industry could be called scientist. But it's still basically a job title so it doesn't work for someone that gets a PhD and then becomes a carpenter. It also has the opposite problem that someone could potentially be a scientist without holding a PhD, so if you specifically want to refer to that then it's imprecise. But it has the much larger problem that it only applies to science! It would be very odd to call someone a scientist because they hold a PhD in modern art or literature, or even mathematics or economics.

As a reader, I prefer "Dr." before a name to mean medical doctor. Someone with a Phd in something else is "Joe Blow, PhD." This is Associated Press style, I believe.

You bring up an interesting angle which is that the title inflation thing in the US now has secondary and tertiary implications. Optometrists call themselves “doctors” as do chiropractors and others. Increasingly it seems medical facilities just go back to the root and put someone’s degree in giant letters on their badge. “MD” “RN” etc. And the public at large increasingly just calls all these people “your healthcare provider” instead of “your doctor.”

In essence physicians are upset at others (optometrists, chiropractors, and such) doing exactly what medical school graduates did in previous generations... insist on people calling them “doctoral to gain more recognition with the public at large. When you know the history it’s all quite amusing.

However if random people are running in providing unqualified expertise to patients in a medical practice though that suggests there are far bigger problems to be dealt with than title games. The “doctor” thing is just a red herring.

I typically just use doctor to mean “person who takes primary responsibility for medical treatment” in any setting. They’re the person in the room who has decision making power and responsibility for those decisions. I didn’t even realize that people were weird about using doctor to refer to people without an MD. Because DOs are definitely doctors too, why not an OD or DDS?

DDS at least in the US typically do part of medical school including clinical clerkships and have a residency to complete. Maybe you’re thinking of DMD?

>> So for all the reasons above when any physician tries to suggest that a physician is the only “real doctor” you can roll your eyes and suggest they crack open a history book and then let them go back to stroking their own ego.

> As to the origin of the title in a medical setting, you may be right, but it has been used that way for a long time now. Being pedantic about its usage isn't helpful when there are lots of bad actors trying to confuse people by referring to its commonly understood meaning.

I wouldn't exactly call it pedantic, just wrong. It's little more than appeal to the remote past as true and correct, which treats and changes or innovations since then as illegitimate.

Also, IIRC, the physician = "real doctor" thing is often just a reflection of the respect and familiarity that ordinary people have for physicians, not some kind of pompousness by physicians themselves.

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