The structures are ever so much smaller, and the patient has just a scant few mL of blood in their entire body, so an EBL of 1 mL represents half their blood volume. Microsurgical instruments and loupes are absolute necessities, as are very, very steady hands.
If you don't see that this is surgery, and more technically challenging than your average lap appy, I can't help you.
The point is that virtually any single thing you can imagine that a doctor does is replicated elsewhere. The example that I used, the performance of a difficult surgical procedure requiring advanced training and exceptional fine motor skills, is something that can be experienced in other professions. If someone just really loved to operate, to apply their fascination with anatomy and surgical skills, but didn't want to do any of the rest of the work of being a doctor, my friend's lab job would let them do that.
There is no other profession that exactly does everything that a physician does. But that wasn't the question being posed. What was asked was whether there was any single thing doctors do that is entirely unique to the profession, and not done outside it. If you are going to break down being a doctor into a series of tasks and microexperiences, then you can find overlap in other professions. If you then complain that at some point the comparison breaks down, well, yes, obviously.
I almost had an answer for something that physicians do which no other profession does: Take ultimate and total responsibility for the health of their patients... Once, that would have been a true statement, and in many places it still is. But consider states which allow nurse practitioners to practice independently of physician oversight. In those places, the NP has taken on that level of responsibility, since there is no one to whom to pass the buck. (I hope that we don't have to go off on a tangent of whether that is the way it should be... I don't think many here would argue that it is in the patients' best interests. Or the nurses' for that matter!)
