Most newly graduating physical therapists now have doctorates, too. Pharmacists and psychologists already made that move. Audiologists, physician assistants, and occupational therapists can also get doctorates.
As nonphysicians with doctorates proliferate, the potential for confusion has grown, and physicians aren't happy about it. A 2008 survey by the American Medical Association found that 38 percent of patients believed that DNPs were medical doctors.
The AMA has produced model "truth in advertising" legislation that requires health professionals, including physicians, to wear badges that clearly spell out their credentials. Similar laws have passed in Oklahoma, Arizona, Florida, and Illinois and are under consideration in California and Pennsylvania.
James Goodyear, a Lansdale general surgeon and president of the Pennsylvania Medical Society, said health-care workers who are not physicians should immediately tell patients what they do.
"I am a physician. They are not," he said. "They trained for hundreds of hours. We trained for thousands of hours."
And, he said, physicians should still be in charge. "We think that those in the allied health fields that get a doctorate such as in nursing are a very, very important component of a physician-directed . . . team," he said.
People with doctorates in other fields said they generally don't want to call themselves doctors around patients, but they reserve the right to do so.
"There are some physicians who look at their title - doctor - as a protected title when it really isn't," said Kathleen Potempa, president of the American Association of Colleges of Nursing (AACN). "There are lots of people who have the entitlement to doctor now."
