"I was very disappointed to see the cover of the February 2012 issue featuring the article on colonoscopies. I thought our profession was beyond belittling ourselves by using demeaning terms such as “nonphysician”. I found the content of the article quite useful, but the editorial staff involved in this article clearly abdicated their responsibilities by not insisting on a more accurate and appropriate term to refer to nurse practitioners and their physician assistant colleagues.
NP’s are not “nonphysicians”. We aren’t trying to be junior doctors, and we certainly aren’t in the profession to be “not as good as” anybody else, which is what this term implies. I thought attorney Barbara Safriet said it nicely (about 20 years ago) when she pointed out that if we are nonphysician providers, then physicians must be non-astronaut providers. The point is, who gets to determine what the gold standard of educational preparation is for a given job function? As the author of the article clearly notes, a variety of types of educational preparation are effective in creating competent colonoscopists.
The editors should have ensured that the article was reframed to reflect this fact, and this could have been accomplished by a simple correction of the terminology used. I sincerely hope that this leading NP journal will cease from referring to NP’s using such a derogatory and misleading term."
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