Asfour AA, Winter JP. Whom should we really call a "doctor"? CMAJ. 2018 May 28;190(21):E660. doi: 10.1503/cmaj.69212. PMID 29807940; PMCID: PMC5973890. Retrieved from https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5973890/ The word doctor is derived from the Latin verb “docere,” meaning to teach, or a scholar.
Asfour AA, Winter JP. Whom should we really call a "doctor"? CMAJ. 2018 May 28;190(21):E660. doi: 10.1503/cmaj.69212. PMID 29807940; PMCID: PMC5973890. Retrieved from https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5973890/ PhD, or Doctor of Philosophy, is the highest graduate degree awarded by our universities. Health professionals receive undergraduate degrees in medicine. These are professional degrees, and not really doctorates. The MD degree is not a part of graduate faculties at North American universities. It has now become fashionable to award so-called Doctor of Law degrees to undergraduate law school graduates in the form of a Juris Doctor or JD degree, including at the University of Windsor. These, too, are merely undergraduate degrees. [...] here are problems with such logic, namely, a degree past a bachelor’s degree could potentially be a master’s degree, but not a doctoral degree. A doctoral degree (PhD) is a degree that one earns after a master’s degree. A PhD entitles a person to use the title doctor. These are the social and physical scientists who conduct and evaluate published research. A PhD degree is normally obtained after six to eight years of hard work past the bachelor’s degree.
