By Joel Thurtell
I was going to assign JOTR columnist and Professor of Mendacity Luke Warm to write one of his satirical essays dismantling an October 2, 2011 New York Times article about the desire of some nurses to assume the unearned title of doctor. The nurses hope their patients and insurance companies will think they are real doctors and not simply nurses with PhDs in subjects that have little or nothing to do with diagnosing and relieving medical disorders.
Luke was rarin’ to go.
The good prof loves to pillory news people.
He planned to rip the Times writer a new porthole for seeming to swallow the nurses’ line of guff. Typically, Luke lambasts his subjects by pretending to praise them for being models of the duplicitous art — which is what the cynical prof perceives journalism to be.
Luke had in mind a spoof whose protagonist would be a bona fide nurse with a bachelor’s degree in nursing from a mainline university nursing school. This nurse would then go on to earn a PhD in the discipline of history, after which the nurse would demand a raise.
What does the study of history have to do with the delivery of medical services, and why should the American consumer be made to pay more for it?
But then, the PhDs that nurses are earning in the newly-created field of “nursing practice” have as much to do with direct care of patients as a degree in history.
The Times used a real-life example of a nurse with a PhD in “nursing practice” who insists on having her patients call her “doctor.”
What did she get from her PhD studies in statistics, epidemiology and health care economics that would translate to improved care for her patients?
Nothing.
The study of health care economics tips her — and her mentors’ — hands, though.
This is all about money.
We already have a class of super-nurses known as nurse practitioners. They have a masters in applied nursing techniques, which makes sense, since it helps them deliver care to patients.
Studying health care economics, on the other hand, only helps nurses help themselves.
Nurse practitioners make about half the pay that family medicine docs earn. Still, that computes to earnings in the $86,000-$90,000 range.
But that apparently is not enough. So now we have nurses with PhDs, which they think means patients have to call them “doctor.”
As long as these phony nurse-doctors are going to gussy themselves up with irrelevant degrees, why not, as Luke Warm suggests, have them get PhDs in history? Or English literature. Or something more practical, like French horn performance?
I kind of like the idea of nurses inflating their credentials with doctorates in music. For a patient suffering from stress, why not have the nurse end the exam by playing a sonata to soothe the passionate brain?
I decided not to have Luke write his smart-ass column, though, because the more I thought about it, the more I realized that my beef was not with the Times’s journalism, but with the nursing profession’s devious grab for an across-the-board wage hike.
Still, I’m annoyed that the Times reproduced the self-serving claptrap that spewed from the University of Michigan’s nursing dean, herself a doctor of some unspecified (by the Times) kind. According to Dean Kathleen Potempa, nurses need PhDs because “knowledge is exploding, and the doctor of nursing practice degree evolved out of a grass-roots recognition that we need to continuously improve our curriculum.”
“Grass roots”?
What does that mean?
Were patients banging on the doors of the Ann Arbor nursing school demanding that their nurses call themselves “doctor”?
“Recognition that we need to continuously improve our curriculum”?
Well, that sounds like an admission that there is something wrong with the course of study at UM.
But can’t you fix it once and have it stay fixed?
Why do you have to continuously fix it?
And how does repairing curriculum help the argument that nurses should call themselves “doctor”?
Doctors and nurses already take part in courses known as “continuing education.” MDs and DOs are re-examined periodically in order to renew their medical licenses. Are nurses not re-examined to keep their licenses?
And how does a PhD in a curriculum unrelated to patient care ensure continuity of competence?
Presumably, the PhD study will follow directly the bachelor’s and master’s study. How then does the PhD — received early in a career — guarantee that its recipient will still be competent 10, 20, 30 or 40 years in future?
It doesn’t. The continuity argument is a red herring.
Luke really wanted to beat on the Times for letting Nurse Potempa have the last words.
By giving a partisan to the debate the last word, the newspaper appears to be championing the nurses’ side of the dispute.
“It’s not like a group of us woke up one day to create a degree as a way to compete with another profession,” Potempa told the Times.
There is an element of truth to her statement, in that this movement towards nurses with doctorates surely has been afoot for some time. The University of Michigan’s PhD in nursing practice is described by the Times as “new,” but it didn’t invent itself overnight. There must have been countless and endless meetings to cook up a strategy of mendacity to promote this unnecessary new entitlement.
Once we reject the “continuing education” argument as baloney, there is only one reason remaining for nurses to confuse patients into thinking they are MDs or DOs. They want a piece of the salary action.
Well, actually, I can think of another reason. Graduate schools of nursing such as the one at the University of Michigan will do a brisk trade in minting new PhDs, billing tuition to the new doctoral candidates and hiring some of the new PhDs to be faculty.
All of which raises the cost of medical services, but ensures job security for nursing profs and deans.
The Times concludes its story by quoting Nurse Potempa: “Nurses are very proud of the fact that they’re nurses, and if nurses had wanted to be doctors, they would have gone to medical school.”
That is excellent advice for nurses who want patients to believe they are physicians, and would like to boost their salaries.
Why don’t they just go to med school and become REAL doctors?
The answer is plain: Because earning a REAL medical degree is a hell of lot harder, more expensive and takes twice as long as sitting through poppycock classes, collecting a sham doctorate, then floating half-baked news stories in quest of an undeserved raise.
Note to readers: I watched my wife earn her M.D. degree, and I know how hard and expensive it is to become a REAL doctor.
