Medical or Dental Doctor of Medicine – how to acquire a medical doctorate in Germany

Foreign medical practitioners, as well as German medical students, often face the same problem: standard procedure requires German medical practitioners to acquire their doctor of medicine degree (Dr. med.), yet this is often challenging due to the pressures of everyday professional life. Read here how to acquire the doctor of medicine or doctor of dentistry – after you have completed your studies and entered the clinic.

The Doctor of Medicine degree is a relevant symbol of competence

In Germany and Switzerland holding the title of ‘Dr. med.’ or ‘Dr. med. dent.’ is still essential for medical practitioners. Patients who seek help with medical issues are often afraid and irrational. As they are vulnerable, they want to lay their problems into competent hands – yet medical decisions are often made under time pressure with no room for complicated communication. This is where trust comes in! In social interactionism theory, the doctor of medicine degree signals that the doctor is to be trusted implicitly, even with complex and challenging issues. It bears witness to the doctor’s ability to work hard and achieve professional competence.

In daily life, this implicit trust can help a lot. Whether physicians or dentists seek to open their own office or surgery or strive for an executive function in health care – a medical doctor title is indispensable to achieving professional recognition and career advancement.

However, German approbation does not formally require a medical doctorate. Therefore, some medical practitioners enter the clinic without a doctorate title and then need to acquire their medical doctorate concomitantly to their daily duties in the clinic.

MBBS, MD, and MD-PhD – are these equivalents to a medical doctorate?

Foreign medical practitioners have often already completed a medical doctorate. However, due to the lack of accreditation regulations, they are not allowed to hold the doctor title – a ‘Dr. med.’ or ‘Dr. med. dent.’ before their name. Others may have a MBBS or an MD. While the MBBS (Bachelor of Medicine, Bachelor of Surgery) is an undergraduate course, the MD (Doctor of Medicine) is a postgraduate course. Despite its name, the MD is not usually comparable to a medical doctorate in Germany because it is structured and taught as a professional degree but not as a research program. Some MD-PhD programs also end in a doctorate, but those are the exception. In Germany, only those can hold the ‘Dr. med.’ or ‘Dr. med. dent.’ title who successfully completed and presented their own medical research.

Both German and foreign medical graduates may face the difficult task of acquiring their doctor of medicine degree after completing their studies while engaging in full-time clinical work commitments and lacking the time or the academic connections to start their own research project.

Finding a medical doctorate project is much like finding a PhD project in other disciplines: aspiring doctors need to find a supervisor willing to support them in their research and guide them through the process. Nonetheless, medical doctoral students face the intrinsic difficulty that the research data they need for their project is generally patient data. Any research on patients underlies severe regulations and must be approved by an ethics committee. On the other hand, literature-based research without an empirical component is rarely deemed sufficient for a medical doctorate.