Death rates are lower in patients treated by female doctors than in those treated by male doctors. A recent study published in the journal Annals of International Medicine found significant differences in health outcomes for persons depending on the gender of their treating doctor.
The researchers used a retrospective observational study design to add to the increasing body of evidence suggesting patients perform better when they are treated by a female doctor.
“What our findings indicate is that female and male physicians practice medicine differently, and these differences have a meaningful impact on patients’ health outcomes,” Dr. Yusuke Tsugawa, a senior author of the study, stated in a press statement.
The researchers examined Medicare claims data from 2016 to 2019 for about 4,58,100 female and almost 3,19,800 male patients. Approximately 31% of those, or 1,42,500 and 97,500, respectively, were treated to by female doctors.
The key outcomes were 30-day mortality after hospital admission and 30-day readmission after release. The researchers wrote that these differences might be caused by several factors.
They claim that male doctors may underestimate the seriousness of their female patients’ illnesses. Previous research has found that male doctors underestimate their female patients’ pain levels, gastrointestinal and cardiovascular symptoms and stroke risk, which may result in delayed or incomplete care.
According to the study, the death rate for female patients treated by female physicians was 8.15%, compared to 8.38% when the physician was male, a clinically significant difference.
While the difference was less for male patients, female doctors still had the edge, with a death rate of 10.15% vs 10.23% for male doctors.
“The findings indicate that patients have lower mortality and readmission rates when treated by female physicians, and the benefit of receiving treatments from female physicians is larger for female patients than for male patients,” the authors of the study wrote.