Hans Lennros wrote in message ...
>Hans (the nitpicker)
It's nitpicking over nothing. When Joel, or any other US dentist, says that
a dentist shouldn't practice medicine, it is clearly (or ought to be)
understood by every US dentist what this means. Such a remark is loaded
with historical, legal, and cultural ramifications. The distinction is
therefore arbitrary, but is real in the minds of dentists practicing here.
There is no argument that dentistry is the treatment of part of the human
body, that it affects and is affected by what is going on in the rest of the
body, and is really a subspecialty of "medical practice" in the most
general sense. But when a dentist in the US uses such phrasing, other
dentists in the US understand what is meant. Unfortunately, this aspect of
the phrasing isn't easily conveyed across cultural borders and must seem
confused or contradictory to someone practicing outside of a society where
such a phrase and its peculiar history are understood. I understand what
Joel meant by such a statement, but I can see how someone in, say, Sweden,
might find his statement absurd.
