Originally Posted by
Tyrolean
Dr. is an academic degree not a profession. If you finish your studies you are Arzt="Medical". If someone adresses you as Dr. you have to correct it. Otherwise it is a misuse of a title. You have to write a theses and then you get your Dr. med.
BWT you start as stud.med. Before the exam you are cand.med. and then nothing until you have passed your Doctorial thesis.
Neither stud. nor cand. are academic titles, at least in Germany. There is nothing wrong if you use this abbreviations, though.
Even a Dr. med. isn't necessarily a physician. My father is a Prof. Dr. med. habil. Dr. phil. but not a physician.
I would partly disagree. Your father is not a Dr. med. but a Dr. med.
habil., at least it reads as such in your quote. The
habil indicates that he wrote did a "Habilitation" not just a normal thesis. Makes a huge difference.
AFAIK you can only hold a Dr. med. if you are a physician as the Dr. med. is linked to the "Staatsexamen". Even if you finished the thesis way before your "Staatsexamen" you are not allowed to use the title until you finished your "Staatsexamen".
You can also write write a thesis at a med. school if you are not a student/graduate of medicine but in this case you will hold a Dr.
rer. med. once you finished the dissertation.