If you need to see a doctor at random, there's a good chance you'll end up seeing either a male or female doctor by pure chance. It is clear that preselecting the doctor's gender avoids randomness in who is seen.
But does it really matter whether your doctor is male or female when it comes to your health? Some people think so, others are less sure.
Well, this question has recently become the subject of scientific research. I'm not going to go into all the details of how the study was done. However, it is useful to know that this study was conducted in North America and involved nearly 1 million patients, all of whom were treated by approximately 50,000 physicians. As expected, male doctors outnumbered female doctors by just over twice as many.
So what were the discoveries? Overall, patients seen by female doctors had better outcomes. When doctors were female, there were fewer deaths and overall lower readmission rates. The effect was even greater when female patients were treated by female doctors. For male patients, the overall observations did not differ significantly, regardless of the gender of the attending physician.
So, are female doctors really better than male doctors? The cited studies are unable to answer this question in a comprehensive and conclusive manner. A simplistic interpretation of the data forces us to conclude that female doctors are actually better.
Female physicians may be more attentive to patients or better at other clinically relevant analyses. There may also be other biases in the study data that suggest female doctors have better outcomes.
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Female doctors appear to be beating male doctors to extrapolate research results. Even more so when treating female patients. If you are a woman, you may have another reason to only want female clinicians. And if you are a man? Well, maybe it doesn't matter that much, but there's no harm in being biased against female clinicians.
However, don't think too much about the above and suddenly start avoiding doctors of a certain gender. First, many people do not have the luxury of choosing the gender of the doctor they see. The next thing to consider is why you need to see a doctor and their specialty. While many medical specialties have a good mix of genders, there are also medical specialties where one side has an advantage over the other.
So you may be looking for a woman, or actually a man, who may not actually be to your taste. The actual choice should depend on the competence of the doctor. If you see a fake, it doesn't really matter whether it's male or female. The results will still be bad.
Dr Alfred Murage is a consultant gynecologist and infertility specialist.
