What's the difference between medicine and nursing?

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I was reading a post recently where several people seemed to be agitated that someone called something in nursing "medical." I understand the fields are different, but really, are they THAT different from each other? You are both providing clinical care to a patient. Nurses spend more time with the patient and provide a lot of the direct care, but other than that, what's the huge difference?

Specializes in Medical.

Medicine and nursing differ in two key ways.

The first is related, but significantly different, philosophies. Medicine's dominant ethos is about the preservation of life; nursing's prevailing belief system is about enhancing the patient's life, including their death. This difference is often summarised as Cure vs Care, and the way it frames each discipline's purpose and professional mission affects every aspect of our work. We need both elements, and neither is superior.

The other essential difference also involves perspective. As medicine becomes increasingly specialised it becomes harder for doctors to see more than a narrow slice of their patients. Some of my patients have six or more units involved in their care, all with their own set of (often conflicting or incompatable) interventions, priorities, prescriptions and outcomes.

Nurses, on the other hand, spend more time with their patients - daily, per admission and, in the case of those with chronic illnesses, a longitudinal relationship that can span over a decade. With scope for a broader view, nurses are therefore better equipped to see patients holistically. They are also more likely to have more clinical experience, at least in the inpatient setting. Once again, both approaches are necessary for best patient outcomes, and neither is "better," just as neither nursing nor medicine are better.

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inventing special nurse language and renaming all those "medical" words

From the start, I have called this "Nursing Nonsense."

"Fever" -vs- "Alteration in Thermo-regulation?"

Let's see now,.. that's 5 letters -vs- 28. How many letters in the alphabet?

When nurses (especially new ones) get overwhelmed with the nonsense, timeliness of appropriate interventions suffer as a result.

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Specializes in Obs & gynae theatres.
Doctors are allowed to diagnose and prescribe. Nurses are not.
Some nurse practitioners/prescribers are allowed to prescribe and/or diagnose over here.
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What's the difference between medicine and nursing?

*** $200k per year

That's not always true. Many doctors have such high rates that some nurses make more than them.

It really depends on the field they are in and where they work.

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Specializes in burn ICU, SICU, ER, Trauma Rapid Response.
That's not always true. Many doctors have such high malpractice insurance rates that some nurses make more than them.

It really depends on the field they are in and where they work.

*** No doctor I work with pays anything at all for malpractice. I think this is true for most physicians. When you say nurses I assume you mean CRNAs. It is true that some of the higher paid CRNAs make more than some of the lower paid physicians. But not staff nurses. Residents not counted. But if you did count them you are right. They only make like $50K.

Family practice, the lowest paid specialty in the medical center where I work, start at $179K plus they get profit sharing bonus at the end of the year, and they get separate on call pay. Those two things can easily add $50K a year to their pay. I know all this because physician pay is published annually to shareholders of the medical center, of which i am one. They don't list it by name but by speciality. They give the average and the highest and lowest of each speciality. Their is paid for them by the medical center. The physicians who own the medical center also own the insurance company.

This medical center is located in a poor, rural area of central Wisconsin and they have about 850 physicians, not counting interns and residents.

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Thank you all for your responses. I can assure you, I wasn't trying to start a fight. I just honestly did not see such a huge difference, like some people make it out to be.

I obviously know that the doctors diagnose and prescribe the treatment for the patient and the nurses implement it, but to me, it seemed like some people were implying (this was in another thread) that nurses didn't have any clinical (or *medical*) value. Like "ohh, well we treat the person, not the disease.."

Oh, really, so you're not treating that guy's disease with whatever you're injecting into him right now?

I don't know, it all seems like a bunch of pointless semantics.

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I recently considered this question for a friend who is currently a technician in cardiology and was considering whether to go back to school to become a Physician's Assistant or a Nurse Practitioner. As with many of you I had some quick, smarty answers but, in fact, because she was really asking me for help in focusing her life I continued to consider the essential differences until I came up with the following from my own observations:

Medicine is all about the PUZZLE

Nursing is all about the PATIENT

and much of the knowledge base (anatomy, physiology, microbiology, pharmacology, etc) is overlapping.

Having seen that I must admit it took alot of anger out of my own practice.

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