Apart from medically unqualified people with doctorates/PhDs calling themselves "a doctor" in clinical contexts being misleading and detrimental to patient safety, it also introduces a serious category error. 🧵
A Dr of philosophy's profession is a **philosopher** with a PhD. Ditto for a nurse, physio, pharmacist, engineer etc who do PhDs in their base profession. Their base profession doesn't magically become "medicine", just because they did a PhD in a non-medical discipline. This should not be difficult to understand.
The only doctor - professionally, occupationally - is a medical doctor, and that's with or without a PhD.
In clinical settings it should be illegal for anyone medically unqualified to misrepresent themselves as "a doctor" on the basis of PhD or doctorate in a non-medical base profession. In society, likewise, it should be recognised that unless the non-medical base profession is specified, a person is misrepresenting themselves if they claim to be "a doctor" but don't have a medical qualification.
I believe many travesties lately were facilitated by deliberate category errors, pretending that men who claim to be women are the same as women being just one of the very well known ones.
This one, unfortunately, has the potential to harm even more medical patients, and to sow chaos in healthcare, by facilitating quackery by non-medical professionals with PhDs and doctorates misrepresenting themselves, practicing medicine without requisite qualifications and endangering patient safety, as well as blurring the boundaries and ethics around the practice of medicine.