BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES - Universitatea de Medicină şi Farmacie

of community health workers who work outside of formal health care
institutions. Managers of health care services, medical records and health
information technicians, and other assistive personnel and support workers
are also considered a vital part of health care teams.
In what will follow is clarified the significance of basic terms
assigned to health givers.
A physician also known as medical practitioner, doctor of
medicine, medical doctor, or simply doctor — is a person which practices
the ancient profession of medicine, which is concerned with maintaining
or restoring human health through the study, diagnosis, and treatment of
disease or injury. This properly requires both a detailed knowledge of the
academic disciplines (such as anatomy and physiology) underlying
diseases and their treatment — the science of medicine — and also a
decent competence in its applied practice — the art or craft of medicine.
The word physician comes from the Ancient Greek word φύσις
(physis) and its derived adjective physikos, meaning "nature" and
"natural". From this, amongst other derivatives came the Vulgar Latin
physicus, which meant a medical practitioner. After the Norman Conquest,
the word entered Middle English, via Old French fisicien, as early as 1100.
Originally, physician meant a practitioner of physic (pronounced with a
hard C). This archaic noun had entered Middle English by 1300 (via Old
French fisique). Physic meant the art or science of treatment with drugs or
medications (as opposed to surgery), and was later used both as a verb and
also to describe the medications themselves.
In modern English, the term physician is used in two main ways,
with relatively broad and narrow meanings respectively. This is the result
of history and is often confusing. These meanings and variations are
explained below.
Especially in North America, the title physician is now widely
used in the broad sense, and applies to any medical practitioner holding a
medical degree. In the United States and Canada, the term physician
usually describes all those holding the degrees of Doctor of Medicine
(MD) and Doctor of Osteopathic Medicine (DO). Within North America,
the title physician, in this broad sense, also describes the holders of
medical degrees from other countries that are equivalent to the North
American Doctor of Medicine degrees; typical examples of such degrees
from Commonwealth countries are MB BS, MB BChir etc.
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