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The Older the Doctor, the Higher the Patient Mortality Rate, Study Finds (arstechnica.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The age of your doctor may impact the quality of the care you receive -- and even cut your chances of survival -- researchers report in the British Medical Journal. Harvard researchers looked over data on more than 700,000 hospital admissions of elderly patients cared for by nearly 19,000 physicians between 2011 and 2014. They found that mortality rates crept up in step with physician age. Patients with doctors under the age of 40 had a 30-day mortality rate of 10.8 percent. With doctors aged 40 to 49, mortality rates inched up to 11.1 percent, then to 11.3 percent with doctors 50 to 59, and 12.1 percent with doctors aged 60 or above. The stats are adjusted for a variety of variables, such as hospital mortality rates and severity of patients' illnesses. All the patients were aged 65 or older and on Medicare. Though the age-related mortality trend was significant overall, it broke down when researchers sorted doctors by caseloads. Older doctors who saw high volumes of patients didn't see their patients' mortality rates increase.
Summary says they were all "elderly patients", so the factor changing is the age of the doctor.
I think the busy doctor == good doctor correlation holds true as well, was certainly the case for mine. Might be that the good ones are kept busy, but I suspect as much that the work keeps their minds sharp.
An older doctor is also more experienced. Patients with serious problems that result in higher mortality, will choose the experienced older doctor.
You seem to presuppose that a longer time between admission and death is necessarily a good thing, and that doctors who don't score high on that has "lost ther edge".
I'm not sure your premise is correct. A doctor who resorts to induced coma will score very well for that premise, but that does not mean he's a good doctor. A doctor that can't explain that a person is brain dead and that life support should end is not doing a good job either. And a doctor who prescribes expensive treatments that patients and families can ill afford, while it only prolongs life in agony is IMHO a worse doctor than one who sees where palliative care is a better solution.
"Elderly patients" covers a lot of territory. A 60 year old and a 90 year old are both elderly, but do not have the same life expectancy. And the 90 year old has likely been seeing the same doctor for years longer, so that doctor is likely older.
If they didn't ask the question, it's not a very useful study.
I would go a little stronger than that.
Older patients DO prefer older doctors.
However it is MUCH more obvious even that that.
Patients WITH MORE SERIOUS ISSUES tend to be allocated to MORE EXPERIENCED (ie: odler) DOCTORS.
And, more serious issues tend to have higher mortality rates.
Of course, they 'adjust for severity of illness', however that is impossible to do, as not all examples of a single illness have the same risks, and the more severe cases end up with the older doctors.
A class case of correlation not being causation - something lost on a lot of younger generation researchers, it seems.
After all, grabbing a few splashy headlines is MUCH more important than any actual science.
Yeah, I agree, except that the life expectancy for people over 65 going to the doctor is probably more consistent.
Plus, it's about the weight of numbers; if the mortality rate for all patients that attend hospital A was 10% and hospital B was 15%, does it matter how old you are when you're picking between those two hospitals? Assuming the same catchment area, hence the choice.
Attending hospital tends to already select for people with a higher than average mortality rate.
Besides, the authors understand there's not enough information to act on, but it's enough to suggest that the area be studied at greater depth to see if there's a case for adjusting how continuing education is managed.