Well, seeing as how American Medical Association membership is restricted solely to MDs and DOs, maybe they have some credibility when they say that it's just plain wrong to call a doctor a "provider." But they're stating that to call a physician a "provider" confuses patients, and is just downright unethical.
Alright, how does lumping docs with other prescribing executive providers such a problem? According to the AMA website, "More than half of U.S. states permit unsupervised practice of medicine by nurse practitioners (NPs)."
But can we still call them "practitioners" and "clinicians?" Let's hope they can staunch this horrible "scope creep" so that we'll all be much safer.
After all, I'm an "information aggregator" and I loath being referred to as a mere "data provider."
Still, I would like to believe that our nation's physicians hold themselves above word fights like this one.
