Talk:medical degree

Tea room discussion

Note: the below discussion was moved from the Wiktionary:Tea room.

Hello all. Greeting from an encyclopedist at Wikipedia. I have just created the medical student entry on Wiktionary and others, including; EncycloPetey and Nadanado were kind enough to welcome me and show me a couple of things and add a couple of things to it.

I've just finished mediating a dispute on Wikipedia that has brought up some interesting possible terms that may need inclusion here at Wiktionary . They are medical school and medical degree. These terms stem from discussions held recently at w:Talk:Medical degree. The questions for here really are; 1) should their definitions exist here, 2) if they do, does the use of the terms indicate some unseen usage of the term medical, and 3) are their meanings modified at all by the inclusion of new professions such as naturopathy and chiropratic etcetera within the "medical profession"?

I think that it's an interesting little problem for us.

There is some discussion between myself and EncycloPetey here and to gain a deeper understanding of how this topic has come up, you could observe the discussion here. :-)

Thanks! :-)

Fr33kman^{talk APW} 03:15, 13 September 2008 (UTC)

In the discussion at your talk-page, EncycloPetey argues for the inclusion of [[medical student]], making the comment that "The term medical student is unusual because the descriptor is the adjective 'medical', but this adjective describes the field of study for the student, rather than the student directly." However, I'm less convinced; quoting Dr. Arnold Zwicky on the topic of “non-dual citizen” and “transformational grammarian”, “There are many different sorts of non-predicating modification — including things like electrical engineer, Vietnamese war, indigenous language, marital bliss, and daily prayers — and there is a gigantic literature on their analysis, in a number of languages.” This doesn't mean that no non-predicating modifications warrant inclusion, only that it's a regular feature of English grammar that a prenominal adjective may not be predicating, so not all non-predicating modifications warrant inclusion, and therefore non-predicating–ness of a modification is not (by itself) grounds for inclusion. (I suspect that not all editors will agree with me, however.) —Ruakh_TALK 15:13, 13 September 2008 (UTC)

I would think that Zwicky's authority would make us look for other warrants for the inclusion of phrases involving the use of [[medical]]. How could such criterion or criteria be operationalized? Would the use of [[medical student]] or others attributively be evidence of idiomaticity of some kind? DCDuring TALK 16:59, 13 September 2008 (UTC)

(starting a new comment, so people can reply to each separately) As for the problem that you describe — the question of whether a student of non-allopathic medicine (or perhaps of neither-allopathic-nor-osteopathic medicine) counts as a medical student — I don't see that as a problem. If we do include [[medical student]], we should define it as it's used; this means we'll certainly have either an allopathic-specific sense or an allopathic+osteopathic-specific sense (or both), since at least one of those is definitely a specific sense that people use, and might mean that we'll also have a catch-all sense. —Ruakh_TALK 15:13, 13 September 2008 (UTC)

I agree and expect that we will find a catch-all sense and a sense limiting the term to "real" medicine, harkening back to the late 19th century (in the US) battles to restrict the profession of medicine to exclude quackery and some fields deemed quackery. There is a chance that a current inclusiveness trend in medical education may force us to rely on older citations for the restrictive sense. I don't see any difference between [[medical student]], [[medical degree]], [[medical education]], [[medical practice]], and possibly others in this regard, which makes me wonder whether any of these warrant inclusion. Can't the battle be fought once/twice at [[medical]] and/or [[medicine]]? DCDuring TALK 16:59, 13 September 2008 (UTC)

If it is "fought" there, then it also has to be fought at (deprecated template usage) student. Consider "biology student", but not "biological student", yet "biological education" and "biological degree" (although rare and a bit awkward) do make sense. Now, it may be that this is more a property of the adjectives and descriptors involved, but in this case the modified noun plays a role as well. The same noun may sometimes take an adjectival descriptor, but other times use an attributive noun. The expectation, then, is for "medicine student", using the otherwise common pattern of attributive noun to describe the field in which the person is a student, just as for "enginerring student", "art student", "communications student". --EncycloPetey 18:07, 13 September 2008 (UTC)

The "fighting" I was thinking about was whether the field defined by the word "medicine" did or did not include fields like homeopathy, osteopathy, naturopathy, acupuncture, etc. We are much too polite to fight over RfD matters. DCDuring TALK 21:47, 13 September 2008 (UTC)

Exactly the discussion that led to the dispute on Wikipedia. After a while we "negotiatied" that it did, but only if the profession provided "hands-on" clinical healing to the level that the average Joe would condier to be a "doctor" :-) Fr33kman^{talk APW} 23:57, 13 September 2008 (UTC)

These still devolve to a SOP argument: is [[medical student]] intrinsically different from [[medical]] [[student]]? I submit it is not. - Amgine/^talk 21:31, 13 September 2008 (UTC)

I hadn't considered that perspective before. If medical student is merely sum of parts, then a person studying pharmacology would be a "medical student", but that is not usually the case. So, the word seems not to be merely the sum of its parts and merits an entry on that basis. --EncycloPetey 00:02, 14 September 2008 (UTC)

I'm not totally sold on that. I think a pharmacology student who says "I study medicine" is either lying, joking, or not a native speaker; medicine is a specific field, and while pharmacologists deal with medicines, that's not the same thing. Now, you can ask why medicine→medical but not medicines→medical, but that quirk isn't specific to "medical student"; the same applies to "medical intern", "medical doctor", "medical textbook", "medical practice", and so on, and therefore needs to be documented at [[medical]]. —Ruakh_TALK 00:32, 14 September 2008 (UTC)

I'd only say that a pharmacy student in my hospital has "student pharmacist" on their IDs; a nursing student has "Student Nurse" and a physiotherapy student's ID has "student physiotherapist". In each case it is the intention of the hospital to convey a "title" upon the student: preliminary though it might be. Student doctor, is not used because its use is controversial. Whilst its use is permitted by the individual student and many students are introduced to patients and addressed by doctors as such. Patients, and thus the public perhaps, know students as "medical students". Indeed further argument could be gained by the fact that the government address them as "medical students", their professional associations address them thus, and the regulatory bodies do likewise. However, Oxford doesn't directly have an entry for the term, but does recognize its usage as

'"2. a. A person who is undergoing a course of study and instruction at a university or other place of higher education or technical training. Also const. of, in (a subject); often with defining word prefixed, as art, law, medical student." (If that link doesn't work or if my use of a quotation is not allowed or incorrect, would someone kindly remove it?)

Fr33kman^{talk APW} 01:31, 14 September 2008 (UTC)

I'd submit that it is different. The term medical student denotes a student doctor and no other possible person whatsoever. I'm not an expert in "words" but the fact that these people are addressed and introduced to patients and colleagues as such makes me wonder if this has become essentially, "a word". It's irrelevant to the discussion really (I am still UNINVOLVED and it's only come up because of the dispute), but on my hospital ID card it entitles me as a "medical student" as does every other ID for student doctors in the UK. Every piece of paper I get from professional sources calls me a "medical student" Fr33kman^{talk APW} 23:52, 13 September 2008 (UTC)

The special organizational status of "medical student" would not, in itself, lead us have an entry. We would need three citations from durably archived sources that illustrate the usage, but I'd bet they would be found. I wonder whether there will be/already has been a time when a "medical student" could be studying "alternative medicine". DCDuring TALK 00:14, 14 September 2008 (UTC)

You know? Discussion here is much more intelligent, ahh, interesting! I've not done the research, but I'd say that medical student has almost always been associated with the schools of allopathy and osteopathy: DOs in the US and a few locations elsewhere that is. I'd say that it has always held the meaning of a person training to be a physician (even if they later become a surgeon). I'd also say (given my study of the history of alternative medicine), that there may have been a time during the late 18th century or early 19th century where students of alternative medicine (as we entitle it today) might have been referred to as medical students. I'd have to do the research. Fr33kman^{talk APW} 01:31, 14 September 2008 (UTC)

1, 2,3... these each are referring to students of Ayurvedic medicine as medical students. It seems to me that any student of any traditional healthcare philosophy other than holistic care models tends to be called a "medical student" - at least in English texts. - Amgine/^talk 18:58, 14 September 2008 (UTC)

Don't we theoretically have a cooccurent/coordinate terms section accounted for in WT:ELE that can deal with this in a clean and simple way?? Circeus 23:12, 16 September 2008 (UTC)