Dr Title or Not?

There is much debate online about the use of the Dr title that goes along the lines of: if you’re not making people better, then you shouldn’t be called Dr.

I think that perspective is nonsense. What about those Doctors who make people better in their minds? Clinical Psychologists and the like. So let’s expand this to include making people better by education. By creating ideas. Maybe by inspiring people in the post-graduate classroom.

The following paragraph makes this point well:

Long long ago (in the early Paleozoic), Islamic law awarded the first Ph.D. degrees in the 9th century; a “Doctor of Laws” degree. Then in the middle ages (shortly after the extinction of the dinosaurs), the Ph.D. or Doctor of Philosophy degree (Latin; philosophiæ doctor, meaning “teacher of philosophy”) was expanded to include all fields of scholarship except theology, law and .. medicine. Let me repeat this in tiny words for the journalists in the crowd: the Ph.D. became THE most advanced academic degree awarded by the vast majority of the English-speaking world and it is required for those Doctors pursuing a career as a university professor or researcher in most scholarly, academic or scientific fields. By comparison, medical practitioners (have) been known as “doctors” only very recently.