staightshooter

Hey, New to the forum and came across your threads. I am not actually heard any of the NPs or PAs refer to themselves as MDs, but as you pointed out, many times the patients are for whatever reason mislead to think that these medical professionals are MDs. I think this happens for a couple of reasons. First, the NP or the PA is the only medical professional these patients see, especially in very small outlying communities. Many of these clinics in small towns don't even have doctors so they hire PAs and NPs to fill the bill. I suppose that since they do many of the things that would normally fall to a practicing physician in other cases, they might come to think of themselves as MDs and of course they don't bother to correct the patients when the patients call them doctor. The second point is that in some cases doctors who work with PAs seem to think of them more as their equals whereas many doctors will think of nurses as close to doormats. One reason for this might be that the PA program was started by doctors for their benefit. Since the PAs are taught by MDs they get automatically get more respect from the MDs than an RN would ever hope to get. I do find this annoying because diploma nurses and BSNs actually have more education that PAs. Our local PA program (notice that these programs are very few and far between) is only 28 months long and yet PAs are suppose to be able to think and perform like the MDs who have close to a decade of study and training before being allowed to practice. Scarry isn't it? On the flip side I have gone to doctor's offices where the PAs duties are little more than those of a medical assistant, so it just depends upon the practice/situation. Straightshooter