People treated by female doctors live longer: study

If you want to live longer see a female doctor, researchers say. 

Patients with female doctors have lower rates of mortality and remission than patients treated by male doctors, according to a study published in the journal Annals of Internal Medicine. Female doctors make up just 37% of doctors in the US.

For the study,  Dr. Yusuke Tsugawa, an associate professor-in-residence of medicine at the University of California Los Angeles, joined his colleagues in looking at Medicare claims made between 2016 and 2019.

The mortality rate for female patients who a female doctor treated were 8.15% compared to 8.38% when treated with a male doctor. The mortality rate was 10.15% for men when treated by a female doctor compared to 10.23% when treated by a male. The research included around 485,100 female patients and 318,000 male patients, according to Medical News Today. 

“What our findings indicate is that female and male physicians practice medicine differently, and these differences have a meaningful impact on patients’ health outcomes,” Tsugawa, a senior author of the study, said.

“Further research on the underlying mechanisms linking physician gender with patient outcomes, and why the benefit of receiving the treatment from female physicians is larger for female patients, has the potential to improve patient outcomes across the board,” he added.

Why are women better doctors?

Christopher Wallis, PhD, an assistant professor in the Division of Urology at the University of Toronto, told Medical News Today that the new study didn’t surprise him and reflects prior research about the gender of doctors and health outcomes. He was not a part of the recent study but has researched differences between male and female surgeons and their respective postoperative outcomes. 

“Across many fields of medicine, numerous studies have demonstrated improved outcomes (whether mortality, readmissions, or others) among patients treated by women physicians. These data recapitulate those findings,” Wallis said. 

“It is not surprising to me to see this for a number of reasons. First, from data going back decades now, we know that women and men practice medicine differently with particular differences in communication styles and guideline adherence. It’s not surprising to me to see these differences translate to patients’ outcomes. Second, both more widely in society and certainly in medicine, women are held to arguably a higher standard than men. This is an exaggerated phenomenon in surgery and may explain some of the differences we’ve seen there,” Wallis added. 

In addition to being held to a higher standard than male doctors and having effective communication styles, women doctors spend more time talking t their patients, looking at their records and performing procedures. 

“Evidence from the outpatient setting demonstrates that female physicians spend more time on the electronic health record than male counterparts and deliver higher quality care,” study co-author Dr. Lisa Rotenstein, an assistant professor and medical director at the University of California San Francisco, told Medical News Today.

“In the surgical realm, female physicians spend longer on a surgical procedure and have lower rates of postoperative readmissions. We need to be asking ourselves how to provide the training and incentives so that all doctors can emulate the care provided by female physicians,” she added. 

Watch and learn

Medical experts suggested that male doctors observe female doctors around them and try to emulate their work.

“I would love for male physicians to look at these data seriously and interrogate their own practices. There is often a tendency to discount data like these because they are uncomfortable or may feel threatening. However, that kind of response will not help patients,” Dr. Arghavan Salles, a clinical associate professor of medicine at Stanford University, told Medical News Today.