Patients Fare Better With Women Doctors, Study Finds

Patients treated by female doctors fare better than patients treated by male doctors, according to new research published Monday, despite the field struggling to improve female representation in research and among practitioners.Patients treated by female physicians in the U.S. had lower mortality rates and lower rates of readmission compared to patients treated by male physicians, according to peer reviewed research published in the Annals of Internal Medicine.

The findings come after researchers from the University of Tokyo in Japan analyzed data from the medical records of more than 700,000 Medicare patients aged 65 years or older hospitalized and treated between 2016 and 2019 to assess the differences between patients treated by male and female physicians.

Just under a third of the roughly 460,000 female and 320,000 male patients included in the study were treated by female physicians, the researchers said, and there were no significant differences between groups when it came to key metrics for evaluating hospital care including length of stay, spending, how likely a discharge to home was, management claims and the proportion of time spent under intensive evaluation.

While both male and female patients treated by female physicians fared better than those treated by male physicians in terms of lower death and readmission rates, the researchers found the difference was especially large and clinically meaningful for female patients, who are underrepresented in medical research and far more likely to sufferThe researchers said multiple reasons could be behind the stark difference in outcomes for female patients when treated by female physicians, such as male...

Being treated by a female physician could also help alleviate the embarrassment, discomfort and social and cultural taboos that can arise for female patients during sensitive examinations, the researchers said.published last year from researchers in Sweden and Canada found people operated on by female surgeons had better outcomes and fewer problems during recovery than when male surgeons had been performing the operations. In the U.S.

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