Medical Doctor

A medical Doctor or a Physician is a person that takes care of those who have diseases or illnesses. To become a medical doctor you have to first go to college for about 4 years, and then to medical school for 2 or 3 more years.  Then you become a resident doctor; this is when you can specialize in any of the medical doctor specializations.

Physician in the broad sense, usual in North America, now applies to any legally qualified practitioner of medicine. In the United States, the term physician is now commonly used to describe any medical doctor holding the Doctor of Medicine (M.D.) or Doctor of Osteopathic Medicine (D.O.) degree. The American Medical Association, established 1847, uses physician in this broad sense to describe all its members. See the article on Medicine for more information on what physicians (in this broad sense) do in practice.

Physician is still widely used in the older, narrow sense, especially outside North America. In this usage, a physician is a specialist in internal medicine or one of its many sub-specialties (especially as opposed to a specialist in surgery). This traditional meaning of physician still conveys a sense of expertise in treatment by drugs or medications, rather than by the procedures of surgeons.[4] This older usage is at least six hundred years old in English; physicians and surgeons were once members of separate professions, and traditionally were rivals. The Shorter OED, third edition, gives a Middle English quotation making this contrast, from as early as 1400: "O Lord, whi is it so greet difference betwixe a cirugian and a phisician." [5] Henry VIII granted a charter to the Royal College of Physicians (London) in 1518, and granted the Company of Barber/Surgeons (ancestor of the Royal College of Surgeons) its separate charter in 1540. In the same year, the same English monarch established the Regius Professorship of Physic at Cambridge University [6]. Hence, in the 16th century, physic meant roughly what internal medicine does now.