Who’s Your Doctor?
Not all of the people who provide your medical care — including some who are addressed using the honorific title “Doctor” — hold the degree Medical Doctor. The American Medical Association released a survey on patients knowledge of medical doctor and about who is — and isn’t — an MD.
In a survey, about two-thirds of participants knew a chiropractor is not an MD. This rate was similar to the proportion of people who knew nurse practitioners are medical doctors. Only one-third knew a dentist was not an MD. Just over half thought an optometrist was an MD. So who cares? The American Medical Association cares. The Wall Street Journal reports:
The AMA is using these survey results, which also show that most respondents prefer to have a physician take the lead on their health care, to push for a piece of legislation called the Healthcare Truth and Transparency Act that it says will prohibit “misleading and deceptive advertising by health-care professionals.”
The American Nurses Association says the act is part of the AMA’s “ongoing effort to limit the scope of practice of health care providers who are not physicians” and would make it illegal for non-physicians to say anything that would lead people to believe that their education, skills or training are the same as an M.D. (or an osteopathic physician, who has a D.O. degree).
If no one cares other than the AMA, maybe the rest of us shouldn’t care either.
This is an unexciting post. It’s also referring to an article that’s somewhat dated. Is that because it’s snowing in Dallas today?
I find it hard to believe that the general population doesn’t understand the difference between all the various caregivers that are addressed as “doctor.”
The Flexner Report, published in 1910, largely condemned U.S. medical education – with the exception of schools backed by the American Medical Association (AMA) that conferred the degree Medical Doctor. The AMA has been waging a rather successfully turf war for the past 100 years to maintain the prestige both in popular culture and the medical establishment for MDs.
The background is fascinating — Paul Starr’s book “The Social Transformation of American Medicine” is about the best work on this topic.
Ken and Bruce: Maybe you ought to care, since you’re paying for these M.D.s — who essentially have a high school education plus special training as mechanics –but artificially reduce the supply by unnecessarily arduous and expensive mechanics’ training, restrictions on the number of medical schools and the supply of foreign-trained human body mechanics.
The only mechanics who have been more successful than M.D.s at this are D.V.M.’s.