Issue 358 Medical Titles June 16, 2014

As you have seen, the medical field is changing in America.  New laws and regulations have left the medical industry scrambling to make things cheap and effective while the number of doctors shrink.  Here I share my opinion on who will be treating who based on their titles that they will have earned after they have gone through their medical training and what I believe the future landscape of Americas medical institutions will look like.

Nurses:  The basic nurse will have the roll of the grunt.  They will do every task imaginable save actual diagnosis.  So they will take blood, do basic readings of a person’s life signs and then feed all that information to the doctor.

Lead Nurse/ Nurse Technician:  While this title may vary, this group will be a step above regular nurses.  They will be in the lab determining results for the test results and even in some cases performing the tests themselves.  They may even lead a group of nurses in the tasks for testing blood for pathogens or other anomalies.  Other technicians will also perform the task of performing x-rays and other similarly more complex tasks where a higher level of training is required.

Note: the aforementioned I believe was already occurring, it is the following that I believe is the recent development due to Obama Care (or at least was accelerated by it).

Nurse Practitioner:  This is the replacement for the Doctor at your most basic level.  They receive all the same training that doctors do (with certain exceptions) to allow them to diagnose diseases like a regular doctor.  They, like doctors, will have the same struggle to acquire hands on experience which will determine if they are good quality like a traditional doctor with the title or not.  Also, they will handle writing all the prescriptions and offer medical advice based on your medical condition.  In fact they may even forward you to a specialist (those with the title of doctor) for cases that are beyond the level of the general practitioner (the Nurse Practitioner).

Doctor:  Here is where doctors become ultra-special.  Most doctors are already shifting to the more specialized fields as this is where they will make the most money.  As such, the title of doctor I believe will eventually become synonymous with the word specialist.  It will become very rare to see a doctor acting as a general practitioner in the future in my opinion.

Conclusion:  I could be wrong, but I also could be right.  Medical titles like money are subject to inflation (making them sound more important than what they really are). But due to changes in medicine and movements toward cheaper healthcare to cut costs without sacrificing quality, we may see new forms of doctors and nurses take up the mantel of the general practitioner or specialist.  What and who treats our injuries and diseases is, in my opinion, up in the air (for it may even be us diagnosing ourselves).