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What's the difference between a doctoral degree and a PhD?
Doctoral degrees are geared towards applied studies such as practising medicine or law.
PhDs are more research-oriented and theoretical.
To further muddy the waters, all PhDs are doctoral degrees, but not all doctoral degrees are PhDs
It's like drawing a distinction between a Masters Degree and an MSc.
Everyone knows that the MSc is better than the other Masters Degrees, so it's natural it should be a tier above in the hierarchy.
Is an MSc better though? Isn't it just a different area than an MA?
I'm just being silly. I have an MSc and my wife has a MA, so I promise there's no ill will - they absolutely are as good as each other. (Honestly, if anything I think she wins out, as she had to write her dissertation by hand - mine was all on computer).
In the same vein, an MD is just as much a doctoral degree as a PhD - it's just in a different area.
In some places PhDs were treated to be higher diploma than an MD though, at least in Hungary there was - many years ago - some odd system where you could only capitalize "Dr." before your name if you had a PhD, if you were "just" an MD or a legal doctor, you could only have it like "dr.".
That's really interesting! So, apologies for the late reply, you sent me down an internet rabbithole.
Two of my good friends are from Hungary, and in the nicest way possible the fact that there's a rule for that doesn't surprise me at all!
One of them had a kid after moving here with her husband and deliberately named her something that they wouldn't have been able to over there. It's just a pretty normal 'English' name, but apparently in Hungary there's a list of approved names for babies.
That particular rule doesn't exist any more, since the country adopted the international system.
That said, the baby name register is stupid and actually quite racist in origin. It was made so that Romani people can't give their kids "unique" names.
I came in sure there was no difference but wow.