Physician Assistants, Doctors, and Nurse Practitioners
Updated: 03/15/2016
Over the last 200 years, several million public books and publications were archived into a database where a word search counted the number of times “physician assistant” or “nurse practitioner” was used. You can see the preliminary results here. Not so surprisingly, "physician assistant" began to pop up around the same time as "nurse practitioner," however, more folks seem to quote nurse practitioners in their novels than physician assistants. Could it be because your average American is less educated about all mid-level providers? Is AAPA doing a poor job of promoting physician assistants in the United States? Are nurse practitioner lobbyist groups stronger than we anticipated? Or is it because there are simply less well-known physician assistants in the scientific community? These are questions I do not have answers for, but if you're curious about the difference between the three different types of advanced providers, please keep reading and enjoy!
