Are Women Really Better Doctors Than Men?
A new study suggests you’re better off if your hospital physician is female.
It’s a battle of the sexes today as we dive into a paper that made me say “wow, what an interesting study” and also “boy am I glad I didn’t do that study”. And that’s because studies like this are always somewhat fraught — they say something about medicine but also something about society — and that makes this… well… a bit precarious. But that’s never stopped us before. So let’s go ahead and try to answer the question: do women make better doctors than men?
On the surface, it seems like a nearly impossible question to answer. It’s too broad for one — what does it mean to be a “better” doctor? And at first blush it would seem there are just too many variables to control for here — the type of doctor, the type of patient, the clinical scenario and so on.
But this paper, which appears in the Annals of Internal Medicine, uses a fairly ingenious method to cut through all the bias by leveraging two simple facts: First, a lot of hospital medicine is conducted by hospitalists these days. And second, due to the shift-based nature of hospitalist work, the hospitalist you get when you are admitted to the hospital is pretty much random.
