As a former Army Medical Corpsman ( not a “corpse—man” as Obama repeatedly pronounced it), let me say it comes from US military, I was called “medic” 1,000 times, sometimes they called me “doc,” which stroked my ego, but the fact is, our schooling at Fort Sam Houston was only 10 weeks long* back in the day, so think of it as a guy with significantly qextra first aid training, and a bit of experience.
*IIRC correctly, the Medical Corpsman training (91A) has nowadays been expanded to 16 weeks.
Who else can you ask to ....
expose themselves to fire to work on a wounded man?
who else would you expect to break cover in the middle of a firefight?
Who else has to expose themselves usually working on their knees giving a target profile to enemy fire as the grunts around them are behind cover?
These guys need lots of pay, lots of medals for their bravery under fire that rarely gets acknowledged.