Petition Surgeons should be called doctors

Medically qualified surgeons should be able to use the title Dr. like their physician colleagues as opposed to Mr. (for males) and Miss. (for females).

In the UK medical doctors training in surgery lose the title of Dr. when they have completed the long and arduous training programme to become a surgeon.

The surgeons' title is confusing to patients and will become more so as the number of new categories of health worker, qualified to carry out limited surgical procedures, increases.

Furthermore, it is completely out of synch with the rest of the world and remains a damaging anachronism.