I’m sorry i just don’t agree with the view that PhDs should always have to add a disclaimer of “oh but not that kind of Dr” every time they use that title.

I’m not sure why you referred to the APHRA guidelines on protected titles. Is your point that medical practitioners should have the term doctor protected for them? They already have protected titles under the law and it explicitly does not include the term doctor.

Or is your point that PhD doctors should have to spell out their area of expertise because that’s a dumb argument too. What decides the area of expertise you annotate? The department you obtained the title from? What if your area of research, while sponsored by that department, is actually in an entirely different field? What if the topic of research doesn’t have a clearly defined field? So in the end it’s completely meaningless, which is why people don’t append a Dr title with a field. In this instance either the author or her editor through writing her bio, or you through reading her bio, has judged that her speciality is “comm”. But someone else could claim that’s wrong and misleading as you have done.