Women may benefit from seeing a female doctor instead of a doctor for certain illnesses. Why is that? An attempt at explanation.
Would you rather go to the doctor? When faced with this question, women in particular often seem to opt for treatment based on their own gender and justify this in online forums, for example, with a better gut feeling. That gut feeling might not be such a bad guide after all.
Older women who are treated in hospital by a female doctor instead of a doctor have a slightly lower mortality rate for certain diseases. At least that’s what a Japanese study shows, which was published in the journal “Annals of Internal Medicine” and is based on data from more than 700,000 patients. A German expert considers the effects observed in the work to be small, but the speculations listed on the reasons for the differences are fundamentally possible.
For their study, the research group at the University of Tokyo analyzed information on patients aged 65 and older who were hospitalized between 2016 and 2019. Of the 458,000 female patients and almost 319,000 patients in this group, around 142,000 women (31.1 percent) and 97,500 men (30.6 percent) were treated by female doctors.
It found that mortality rates 30 days after hospital admission were slightly lower for women treated by female doctors. In addition, these women were less likely to have to go to the clinic again for treatment. Men, on the other hand, showed no significant differences, regardless of whether they were treated by doctors.
Just small effects
The result for women does not surprise Ute Seeland. The doctor, who has Germany’s first professorship for gender-sensitive medicine and prevention with a university outpatient clinic at the University of Magdeburg, points out that the effects described in the study are only small. In fact, the mortality rate for female patients was 8.15 percent when treated by a female doctor versus 8.38 percent when treated by men – a difference that was small but clinically significant, the study found.
Seeland emphasizes that a closer look is necessary here: the differences between the sexes in treatment by doctors must be viewed in relation to the disease. A corresponding breakdown in the study shows that patients who were admitted with nervous system diseases as well as diseases of the kidneys and urinary tract particularly benefited from treatment by a woman.
According to Seeland, the study design cannot answer why women benefit from treatment by female doctors. The study also cannot clarify whether women actually benefit from treatment by a female doctor or whether other associated factors play a role. However, Seeland still believes the reasons given in the work are possible.
Specifically, the study lists three possible reasons for the observed effect. On the one hand, doctors could tend to underestimate the severity of the disease in patients. This would not only fit with the experiences that women have been sharing for some time under the hashtag #frauenbeimarzt on X (formerly Twitter), but also with the results of older studies. Previous research has shown that male doctors underestimate their patients’ levels of pain, gastrointestinal and cardiovascular symptoms, and stroke risk, which could lead to delayed or incomplete care.
The male patient as the norm
A problem in this context is that women are often underrepresented in studies of diseases and medications. Because of this gap, it was not known for a long time that a heart attack can manifest itself differently in women than in men. “And heart attack is just one disease in which we see these differences,” says Ute Seeland.
In their opinion, this also explains the differences in mortality rates among women with nervous system diseases. “Dementia is more common in women than in men – with this knowledge, female doctors could potentially take such illnesses more seriously in their patients, as the consequences mean a longer period of suffering if women live longer than men,” speculates Seeland.
Female doctors communicate better
In addition, the treatment of dementia sufferers requires patience and time: “Characteristics that are stereotypically attributed to women,” says the doctor. In fact, one of the assumptions in the study is that treatment by female doctors could be associated with more effective communication and a stronger focus on patients.
This would fit with a study from Leipzig in 2014, which found that female doctors speak to patients differently than their male colleagues. In the study of people suffering from cancer, it became clear that they are happier when communication is good – and this satisfaction was greater among female doctors.
Finally, the current work assumes that patients are more open with female doctors when it comes to shameful topics. According to Ute Seeland, this is a completely plausible thesis, which could also explain the greater success of female doctors in treating women with urinary tract diseases in the study: “Such illnesses touch on sensitive areas that are sometimes also fraught with taboos when it comes to incontinence, for example.” Female doctors could possibly be more sensitive here.
For the authors, their results underline the need to further improve gender diversity in the medical profession – a conclusion that doctor Seeland agrees with, as well as the call formulated in the study for more research in this area in order to better address the differences described understand. Data on the topic is particularly rare in Germany, says Seeland. She concludes: “The study is not a milestone for gender-sensitive medicine, but it joins a growing body of work on this complex topic.”