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physician — news, coverage & facts — IJR

North American

In the United States and Canada, the term physician describes all medical practitioners holding a professional medical degree. The American Medical Association (AMA), established in 1847, as well as the American Osteopathic Association, founded in 1897, both currently use the term physician to describe members. The AMA advocates for the definition of a physician as "an individual possessing degree of either a Doctor of Medicine or Doctor of Osteopathic Medicine". However, the American College of Physicians, established in 1915, use the term physician in its original sense. Specialists in internal medicine may be described as an internist. Another term, hospitalist, was introduced in 1996, to describe US specialists in internal medicine who work largely or exclusively in hospitals. Such "hospitalists" now make up about 19% of all US general internists, who are often called general physicians in Commonwealth countries. In North America, community-oriented providers of primary care are called family doctors or primary care physicians.

The vast majority of physicians trained in the United States have a Doctor of Medicine degree, and use the initials M.D. A smaller number attend osteopathic medical schools and have a Doctor of Osteopathic Medicine degree and use the initials D.O. The World Directory of Medical Schools lists both MD and DO granting schools as medical schools located in the United States. After completion of medical school, physicians complete a residency in the specialty in which they will practice. Subspecialties require the completion of a fellowship after residency. Both MD and DO physicians participate in the National Resident Matching Program (NRMP) and attend ACGME-accredited residencies and fellowships across all medical specialties to obtain licensure. All boards of certification now require that physicians demonstrate, by examination, continuing mastery of the core knowledge and skills for a chosen specialty. Recertification varies by particular specialty between every seven and every ten years.

As of 2022, more than a quarter of physicians in the United States were graduates of medical programs outside the United States, otherwise known as "IMGs" for "international medical graduates". As of 2026, more than a third of internal medicine physicians in the United States were IMGs.

Biomedicine

Within Western culture and over recent centuries, medicine has become increasingly based on scientific reductionism and materialism. This style of medicine is now dominant throughout the industrialized world, and is often termed biomedicine by medical anthropologists. Biomedicine "formulates the human body and disease in a culturally distinctive pattern", and is a world view learnt by medical students. Within this tradition, the medical model is a term for the complete "set of procedures in which all doctors are trained", including mental attitudes. A particularly clear expression of this world view, currently dominant among conventional doctors, is evidence-based medicine. Within conventional medicine, most doctors still pay heed to their ancient traditions:

The critical sense and sceptical attitude of the Hippocratic school ... the emancipation of medicine from the shackles of priestcraft and of caste; secondly, the conception of medicine as an art based on accurate observation, and as a science, an integral part of the science of man and of nature; thirdly, the high moral ideals, expressed in that most "memorable of human documents" (Gomperz), the Hippocratic oath; and fourthly, the conception and realization of medicine as the profession of a cultivated gentleman.

— Sir William Osler, Chauvinism in Medicine (1902)

In this Western tradition, doctors are considered to be members of a learned profession, and enjoy high social status, often combined with expectations of a high and stable income and job security. However, medical practitioners often work long and inflexible hours, with shifts at unsociable times. Their high status is partly from their extensive training requirements, and also because of their occupation's special ethical and legal duties. The term traditionally used by doctors to describe a person seeking their help is the word patient (although one who visits a doctor for a routine check-up may also be so described). This word patient is an ancient reminder of medical duty, as it originally meant 'one who suffers'. The English noun comes from the Latin word patiens, the present participle of the deponent verb, patior, meaning 'I am suffering', and akin to the Greek verb πάσχειν (romanized: paschein, lit. to suffer) and its cognate noun πάθος (pathos, suffering).