Is it worth giving up the good old family doctor and urgently looking for a general practitioner? In any case, this is the first desire, prompted by the results of a study published in the Annals of Internal Medicine and reported by Medical News Today. Based on work done by Dr. Yusuke Tsugawa, head of the Los Angeles School of Medicine, patients whose primary care physician is a woman are generally in better health than others.
“Our research shows that men and women practice medicine differently, and these differences have a significant impact on patient health.”, says co-author of the study. He adds that these “Extensive research into the underlying mechanisms that link practitioner gender and patient health, and why women particularly benefit from treatment by women, could improve patient care”.
The analyzes by Yusuke Tsugawa and his team, based on data collected from the Medicare health insurance program between 2016 and 2019, included approximately 458,100 female patients and 318,800 male patients. In total, 31% of these people had a female GP.
Ultimately, the mortality rate for women treated by a woman was 8.15%, compared with 8.38% for women treated by a man; for male patients, these percentages were respectively 10.15% (for a general practitioner) and 10.23% (for a general practitioner).
Female models
The differences may seem small, but in these samples they are still quite significant. They can be explained in different ways, including the fact that “Practitioners spend more time with their patients and are more involved in sharing and communicating their diagnoses than their colleagues.”, as summarized by Dr. Lisa Rothenstein, co-author of the study and director of the University of San Francisco. This conclusion was reached by an (anonymized) study of data recorded by various medical devices.
“In the surgical field adds Lisa Rothenstein, female doctors spend more time on procedures and have lower postoperative readmission rates. We need to ask ourselves how we can train and motivate all doctors to provide the same quality of care as women.”
It’s not a secret to anybody: Care (an anglicism used in France to denote the act of caring for others, medical or not) is usually referred to as the female gender, hence the figures: in France, 13% of nurses account for 87% of nurses.
Another explanation, this time provided by urologist Christopher Wallis, who worked on another study linking physician gender and patients’ health status: Because they have more waiting lists, women are more demanding of themselves. “We know that women and men do not practice medicine in the same way, with particular differences in communication and adherence to procedures. […] In society, and especially in medicine, they are also held to higher standards than men.”
The message is clear: male doctors must seriously reconsider how they practice their discipline and be more methodical, more thoughtful and more empathetic – or consider a career change.
We may be witnessing a paradigm shift: In the United States, women currently make up 37% of general practitioners, but that number is growing. In France, according to the Order of Physicians, 65% of general practitioners under the age of 40 are now women.
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