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Women Die More From Heart Attacks Than Men -- Unless the ER Doc Is Female (scientificamerican.com)
Women who suffer from heart attacks may be at a higher risk of death in the emergency room if they see a male physician rather than a female one, a new study suggests. The study doesn't jump to conclusions, but doctors and cardiologists have a few theories. There could be a systematic bias where male physicians are not listening to female patients' complaints as readily as [those of] a man, or there could be a bias that favors men in the medical literature, leading to misdiagnoses in women. It may also be that female doctors do a better job than their male counterparts. "In the new study everyone was more likely to survive if they saw a female physician, and a study published last year [...] indicated all patients of female physicians had lower mortality and hospital readmission rates," reports Scientific American. From the report: Heart disease is the number-one killer of both men and women, but the latter are significantly less likely to survive heart attacks. According to 2016 American Heart Association statement, 26 percent of women will die within a year of a heart attack compared with just 19 percent of men. The gap widens with time: By five years after a heart attack almost half of women die, compared with 36 percent of men. The reason has eluded researchers for years, but the authors of the new study point to the disparity in male and female representation in emergency doctors as a potential source of answers. The researchers analyzed a Florida Agency for Health Care Administration database containing every heart attack case from every ER in the state (excluding Veterans Affairs hospitals) between 1991 and 2010.
The researchers divided 500,000-plus cases into four categories: male doctors treating men; male doctors treating women; female doctors treating men; and female doctors treating women. "All of those are statistically indistinguishable except for male doctor -- female patient," says Brad Greenwood, an author on the study and a data scientist at the University of Minnesota. If a heart attack patient is a woman and her emergency physician is a man, he says, her risk of death suddenly rises by about 12 percent. Put another way, a heart attack patient dies in the ER about 11.9 percent of the time overall -- but the research team found women with heart attacks will die about 12.4 percent of the time if their cases are handled by male doctors. This means approximately one out of every 66 women with heart attacks dies in the emergency room if she sees a male doctor rather than a female one.
The researchers divided 500,000-plus cases into four categories: male doctors treating men; male doctors treating women; female doctors treating men; and female doctors treating women. "All of those are statistically indistinguishable except for male doctor -- female patient," says Brad Greenwood, an author on the study and a data scientist at the University of Minnesota. If a heart attack patient is a woman and her emergency physician is a man, he says, her risk of death suddenly rises by about 12 percent. Put another way, a heart attack patient dies in the ER about 11.9 percent of the time overall -- but the research team found women with heart attacks will die about 12.4 percent of the time if their cases are handled by male doctors. This means approximately one out of every 66 women with heart attacks dies in the emergency room if she sees a male doctor rather than a female one.
Same way men will lie about their problems so as not to appear lesser. Nothing says women don't have pride.
Have all doctors identify as women and all patients identify as men.
It could also be the female cardiologists are less experienced, less senior or less competent. Therefore they are only assigned the easier, more routine, lower-risk cases. The obviously very hard and high-risk cases are assigned to the best cardiologist available. Obviously the hard cases are going to have a higher mortality no matter what treatment is done so it could make the experienced cardiologists look worse.
I think this work pattern is very typical - for instance I work in IT. More mundane, less urgent bugs are assigned to less experienced staff. If the whole system is coming down or there's a serious vulnerability you pull in the big guns.
Just imagine the SJW outrage if the study had pointed in the opposite direction, with male doctors having better outcomes.
No it doesn't.
[...] a heart attack patient dies in the ER about 11.9 percent of the time overall -- but the research team found women with heart attacks will die about 12.4 percent of the time if their cases are handled by male doctors.
That's more like a 4% rise, not a 12% rise. Overstating threefold much?
From the abstract: "We further find that male physicians with more exposure to female patients and female physicians have more success treating female patients."
http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2018/07/31/1800097115
Just seems like people with more experience in treating females are better at treating females.
This is a stupid idea... but could male doctors hesitate for a second before tearing off the blouse and starting a heart massage?
"Men Die More From Heart Attacks Than Women -- Unless the ER Doc Is Male" is logically equivalent. Do we interpret it the same way?
No? The TFS sure as hell does!
I tend to rant.
(from the referenced paper in the article, page 918 left side):
Women are often older when they present with their first AMI, at an average age of 71.8 years compared with 65 years for men.
(with AMI meaning Acute Myocardial Infarction)
Now, could it be that the shorter long term survival rate has more to do with age than gender?
Also, there is a very interesting graph on the previous page depicting the AMI-related deaths for both sexes, with female deaths due to cardiovascular faults being in sharp decline since 2000. So either something happened around that time that made women less susceptible to dying from a heart attack, or something else took over as the big lady killer.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
for women to have fewer heart attacks, like they did when they stayed home, kept house and raised the kids.
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
First proposition:
In the new study everyone was more likely to survive if they saw a female physician
Second proposition:
The researchers divided 500,000-plus cases into four categories: male doctors treating men; male doctors treating women; female doctors treating men; and female doctors treating women. " All of those are statistically indistinguishable except for male doctor -- female patient ," says Brad Greenwood, an author on the study
Since the second is apparently from an author, I'd tend to guess the first is "journalistic flair" (ahem) from someone carrying around a gender hammer. Unfortunately can't look at the study itself to confirm -- the link in TFS is actually to the AHA 2016 statement and the actual study is paywalled.
Just wait until the Screeching Harpies of the Democrats get a hold of this.
Endless bleating will follow.
Maybe male doctors are scared of the rape accusation if touching a female patient...
Maybe male doctors are too sexy for female patients. The study did not subtract out the patients George Clooney treated.
But I guess we'll have to make sure that they're not learning from predominantly male diagnosticians.
That's all you need to know folks.
Beau, I've seen your twitter account, I've seen your submissions here.
Cut this shit out.
If I recall correctly, heart attacks have to be fixed with CPR? Could be the doctors male doctors simply don't want to be accused of indecency in a psychopath-infested feminist world. I think it's better to just leave them to die than risk having touched their chest and getting wrongfully accused. That'll teach them to fuck with the patriarchy.
That's the dumbest shit I've read today and in 2018, you read a lot of shit a day. A 10% statistically deviation, seems very low to me. Could it be that man tend to work more nightshifts then woman, meaning the strokes you see in that time are more severe or had a longer history then the once you see during a day? Just a guess, but in times of SJW cherry picking the news, this calculation goes right to the flat earth believers for me ....
The third hypothesis should be easily testable as you can look at success rate across all surgeries based on sex of patient and doctor. It could well be that female surgeons have better success rates across all patients, though a weirder finding would be success rate correlated to similarly between sex of the patient and doctor.
The second seems more likely to me from my own perspective as I know that that symptoms of a heart attack present differently in males and females. But I expect medical professionals to know those differences and be well versed in spotting the signs, so I think that to be unlikely as well, at least without further reasons to suggest this cause. Maybe if the rate of female heart attacks was much lower, but it is a serious medical event and it does not seem to be the type of thing that men would get wrong unless there there are a lot of other conditions where the same happens.
The first seems unlikely for a variety of reasons. If it were the case, you would expect to see this across all kinds of different conditions. It makes no sense for male doctors to pay attention to female patients for all conditions other than heart attacks. Research has also shown that men will be more sympathetic towards women than other men, so it seems unlikely unless this is a strange case where male doctors are trying to be too reassuring, but if that were the case we should expect to see this in cases outside of heart attacks as well.
I think all of these are easily testable so check the statistics and figure out what it is. I will offer an alternative (and highly uniformed) hypothis though: Male doctors work more hours and have worse patient outcomes as a result. This could be verified by looking at outcomes between male doctors based on hours worked. I am not confident in this hypothesis, but not much less than those stated in the article.
For the paper what seem to have happen is two fold.
First they had an open question, wanted to see if patients had different outcomes from male and female doctors, this is a prime example on how to poke the data until something came out, you just look at every combination until something presents a statistical significant value, I bet that if they do this study again they will get different findings.
Second, the difference was not that big, 0,5% less on the outcome of both cases, mortality and readmission, (or about 4% in relative terms) when treated by a woman, when the biggest difference in outcome, according the numbers by SciAm, was the gender itself, 26% of women will die within a year of a heart attack compared with 19% of men.
The researches say they adjusted for several factors, but I wonder if differences in choices of time or location of work between men and women may cause the difference, if it is actually real.
And by the way, the mean age of patients in the study is 80 years old, and almost 2/3 were women.
For the SciAm article, they seem to not report on the paper, but on part of the raw data in the paper, which is likely not adjusted for confounding factors and the report also seem very biased and sensationalist.
Talk about a headline that's spun all to hell. How is that any different from "Men die more from heart attacks than Women, unless the ER doc is male"??? It's the same damned fact. And yet I don't see anyone else pointing this out. I'm depressed at the state of /. commentators these days.
A better, Slashdot oriented headline would be something like "Heart attack mortality rate bears correlation with gender of patient vs. doctor" but I guess less of you would click on it if it said that, eh?
Just remove this meaningless social construct that is gender from the study and the problem goes away.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
It is called "survival of the best". If you have a number of men and a number of women going into a profession, more women quit over time to, basically, be a mother, while discovering for themselves a career isn't all that. However, the best are more likely to stay, they are less likely to give it up when they are really good at it. It isn't that women are better at this profession, but that it's more likely the bad apples are removed while the male ones will persist.
Maybe the men threat the higher risk patient... Maybe, the most experienced doctor are male and focus on complex cases.
I wasn't expecting a scientifically illiterate to write an article on Slashdot. No, that study does not prove a woman has more chances to die, it shows a correlation. Please learn the difference.
"her risk of death suddenly rises by about 12 percent. Put another way, a heart attack patient dies in the ER about 11.9 percent of the time overall -- but the research team found women with heart attacks will die about 12.4 percent of the time if their cases are handled by male doctors"
Women have a 0.5% MORE of a chance of dying when worked on by a male doctor.
That's not 12% more often than others (11.9%). That's a bit more than 4%.
Unless I've missed something.
I like how all the possibilities put men at fault. What if women just don't heed what men say when they tell them they need to make changes after a heart attack.
Oh he's just mansplaining that I had a heart attack because I don't exercise and my diet consists of nothing but Twinkies and pizza.
Cardiovascular disease
Male physicians: 19,435 (89.2 percent)
Female physicians: 2,365 (10.8 percent)
( https://www.beckersasc.com/gastroenterology-and-endoscopy/male-female-active-physicians-70-statistics-by-specialty.html )
It's hard to point to the specific selection bias since there so many to consider. But if I had to guess, when female elderly go for a checkup with nothing wrong with them under the referral of the family physician, more than a few make an effort at picking a female doctor. Alternatively, when patients are admitted to critical care, there significantly more male cardio surgeons/docs available than female so the male docs end up treating most of the really bad stuff...
Really, so long as the disparity is so significant, there's just too many selection biases to choose from.
On average, female doctors treat fewer patients, work fewer hours and work in less risky fields. This makes their mortality rates look better than their male counterparts, but
I would hazard a guess that we will see a series of co-variables in operation that affect the outcome, and these will involve a filtering so the tougher cases go to men to deal with.
Not too long ago I saw a report on a study that women were much less likely to receive CPR. There were two reasons - bystanders still thought woman were less likely to have a heart attack and thus just thought "she fainted" and that people did not want to risk potential "sexual assault" charges for performing chest compression. They had concluded that both of these factored in to higher rate of death for females from heart attack.
https://xkcd.com/882/
I need to say this: despite the fact that misoginy is a real problem in our society, this is just a spurious correlation.
Is it possible it has more to do with the women than the doctor? The statistical jump is pretty small for the Male Doctor/Female Patient cohort. It could be that this percentage of women are unwilling to do what their Male doctor says post treatment. Maybe the Male doctor says to cut salt, sugar and flour. Most men and women after a heart attack follow those orders. But perhaps a small percentage of those women, when given these instructions by a man, are more resentful and rebellious and are more likely to ignore the life saving advice. After all, who does that Male doctor think he is, mansplaining my diet to me?
Maybe.
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How about:
(1) male physicians are bigger risk takers and take on harder cases
(2) male physicians are taking a longer view picture and don't waste resources on patients that may not die in the emergency room but will die within a few days
(3) male physicians do, in fact, listen more to their patients, about 20% of whom have do not resuscitate orders, and more who may express a verbal preference against extraordinary measures or a life with severe mental disability
(4) there are differences in reporting between male and female physicians
All medical systems are geared towards their main customer demographic. It is women ofcourse. The only place that has more men than women patients are urology departments.
made from minimal samples, presented as facts.
Dead is dead isn't it? I'm not sure there is a way to be more dead than someone else.
What was not usable from the Veterans Affairs data sets?
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
No. More women do not die from heart diseases than men as the title would state. Still, to this day, more men die every year of heart disease than women while women hold a a slight advantage with a higher population.
Do women have a less chance of surviving after a heart attack, yes. Biologically they don't bounce back like men do and typically only get one trip to the ER for it. This is about the only useful fact in the article. I have witnessed numerous heart tests on women in the ER, so that "fact" is dubious at best. But it was a Harvard study from which the Harvard participants were trying to push a gender gap agenda...again.
One might as well throw out this whole damn story at this point. Much like the gender pay gap, you'll quickly find enough errors in their logic as well as a totally false conclusion that none of it can be deemed credible at all.
"It may be, for example, that female patients are less good at volunteering the important information . ."
Possibly men and women just communicate differently. Women, in general, might have developed better communication skill and normally carry the 'nuance' load in conversations. If that were the case, then matters such as heart attacks might distract them enough to drop the load for the moment. Most of the male doctors, having never learned the skill, fall down when they need to pick it up.
It's weird, but I'm a guy and I like female doctors. I've had male and female doctors as my PCP, and generally speaking the female doctors I just felt were more efficient and I could open up to, and they generally found my problem and gave me the right treatment. If i need to pick a doctor these days, I usually go with a female one.
I also know a few people who've been through med school as doctors, including several cardiologists. I will say this: somehow this doesn't surprise me. The guys who went into cardiology, there's just something wrong. THey say it's about saving lives, but it somehow rings hollow. It doesn't help that cardiology is the second highest paying specialty in medicine, and that specialists generally work a 9 to 5 job. It just seems that the men I know who went into cardiology are looking for the prestige, whereas the women I know are actually trying to help. Admittedly that's a small data set as it's just a few people and thus anecdotal, but it's enough to make me trust female doctors more than male doctors.
Stress is a significant factor in heart conditions, it seems more likely that this is a psychological issue: It doesn't seem unreasonable that female patients might be more comfortable interacting with a female doctor - I don't think it's possible to even call that sexists, sometimes there are just same sex preferences when it comes to professions involving the body.
A partner of mine suffered from agoraphobia terribly, sometimes suffering anxiety and tachycardia with HR over 220 for extended periods. Counseling, medication, nothing seemed to be effective, and she was a highly-skilled RN, just adding to her frustration. It ruined our relationship long before it became so debilitating she was considering changing her career.
One attack landed her in the ER and in front of the new-in-town cardiologist fresh from residency in a well-known hospital. According to the ER nurse he took a two minute look at the EKG, ordered tests stat, another two minute read, and was on the phone back to his residency hospital, booking air evac, and sending her to his mentor.
She had a conduction defect. Not merely undetected for her entire life, but actually ruled out by more than one cardiologist previously, certain she was just having panic attacks. Yes, this caused a few uncomfortable discussions, and this fresh new cardiologist left the area and joined a big-city practice, for he had stumbled into a nice, quiet city that loved its doctors, and did not appreciate having them called out as having missed one diagnosis.
Why? Well, first, women were once considered 'hysterical' beings, prone to problems that were psychological and not physical. This is hard to overcome, even generations later. And much heart disease is, even today, considered a male problem, as if women all eat well, suffer less stress, and are not physically active.
How many have died needlessly?
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
Well, that's a relief... it is amazing, what insights can be gained from statistics, once you remove the shackles and the blinds imposed by the political correctness.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
I'd like to see better statistics. On average, a first heart attack strikes men at age 65; women, 72. A 72 year old is simply more likely to die of a heart attack than a 65 year old one; age matters. There's no surprise that women are more likely to die, and although women are more likely to die of their heart attack, men still, on the average, die earlier of heart attacks.
The difference between male and female doctors is interesting, but note that the difference is actually small: according to the article, a heart attack patient dies in the ER about 11.9 percent of the time, versus 12.4 percent with female doctors-- the difference is one part in two hundred. So I agree with the caution suggested by an outside researcher about this study: "Emergency doctors and cardiologists, however, are wary of jumping to conclusions just yet. It is a little early to say male physicians have trouble treating female heart attack patients based on these data alone, says Michelle O’Donoghue, a cardiologist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School who did not work on the new study." Right: let's look at confounding effects first.
The big confounding effect here is age in doctors, not just patients: on the average, female doctors are younger than male doctors, and thus more recently educated and presumably up to date on the most modern techniques. I'd like to see that effect accounted for.
They already did, some time ago. Google "BBC health gap" and prepare to be horrified (it's a series of articles written by some dickless man calling himself a doctor) . Somehow even though women live 8 yrs longer, are healthier, die less at work (93:7), die less from suicide (3:1) there is a health gap, a systematic war against women of which the whole medical profession (where women are the majority) is complicit....
Yes, an interesting point. Men die earlier. How is this effect accounted for?
Surely women don't die more. May more often, though :-p
We need to kill more males with heart attacks to equal the playing field.
Equal rights.
I'd be more inclined to look at the different motivations for male and female doctors.
Men are motivated to become doctors because it is a highly prestigious profession, they are also more likely to choose to become specialist in something like surgery.
Female doctors are much more likely to be motivated by compassionate and empathic reasons, the also more like to become general practitioners.
This is going lead to different levels of experience and skill in communication and diagnostics.
That the cases are equivalent. The males may be taking on the more difficult cases. Or they may be given the more difficult cases. Or, they may be called in at the end as a last resort and the death is recorded to them.
E Proelio Veritas.
The three examples given in the summary are all very focused on a certain mindset.
Maybe women get more stressed when around men and that's the last thing you want to put on your heart while it's in the process of stopping for breather.
No, must be mysoginy.
This article is slanted againt men, why are the possible indicators all male negative?
Should be the first red flag.
Also separately for doctors themselves.
Would be interesting whether mutual or one-sided attraction/distraction plays into it. Having a heart attack is not the best moment to be coy or to get distracted. So looking at the "chemistry" might be a way to get a more detailed view on the structure of the findings.
Let me guess these were all female "scientists", huh?
Since the average age of male physicians and surgeons is 49.1, and the average age of female physicians and surgeons is 42.7 and more recent doctors will be trained better on indentifying female heart attacks - it might be age rather than gender that is giving this result and gender just happens to correlate with age.
Probably a bunch of hooey.
This "study" smells like somebody with a conclusion in search of a study to support it. The sheer number of morons in social sciences who don't understand statistics is astounding. Something as simple as a coin toss is random and yet the probability of getting 5 heads and 5 tails in 10 tosses is less than 8%. What does that mean? It means that even when a variable is truly random, every set of trials will have a distinct distribution that centers around the mean, but doesn't usually fall right upon it. It is not unexpected that comparing mortality of patients of male versus female doctors would show some variability that is NOT due to any difference between male and female doctors. Before we can infer a causal relationship we're going to have to have something better than a result that has deviated by 1.5% from that of perfect chance.
Somebody with a weak heart is going to be pretty susceptible to things that most people normally brush off. Something that we've recently come to understand is that men make people tense. They don't need to have done anything wrong or have any threatening mannerism; the response is triggered by pheromones and subconscious psychological processes. What would be a barely noticed vague unease for anyone else could be fatal for somebody already teetering on the edge.
Good clickbaid. But lets try a rational test statistic (slashdot = scientists and engineers looking for fact not innuendo). How 'bout the t-test number rather than the simple correlation (I'm in a garage, I'm a car....). T-test? Is the data statically significant? Yes or no.
But alas, that does not sell clicks....
What you want or need does not matter one iota to those sick twisted fucks.
What we REALLY need is a reliable sociopath detector and a firing squad.
I'm not sue about the Operating Room thing, but I do more than one person who has had a first heart attack, had the operation and (typically) have stints and arteries replaced. They all are i excellent health today; the oldest had his operation nearly 20 years ago and none have had a post-operative attack. So the ER surgeons are doing something right.
With women, Estrogen protects them from heart disease until menopause (typically early 40's to mid-50's) but from that point onward heart disease is just as likely as a male. Women's bodies are survival-tuned so they live longer than males and if they don't have issues in childbirth they have lower mortality until old age.
But, look at employed females. They have a much higher rate of desk jobs than males. Desk Jobs are heart killers. 10 to 25 years after menopause, desk job, children out of the home, so a high likelihood of sedentary lifestyle and no Estrogen protection before retirement. That is plenty of time and lifestyle to introduce Heart Disease. Add in obesity which tends to worsen as someone who tends toward overweight ages, diabetes Type 2 risk (which will kill your heart if you manage to survive the other ways it attacks the body and organs), and the final issue ... if you are elderly and in "perfect" health, you always die of a Heart Attack.
Some of these health risk rates are also suspect. Everybody these days in a modern society gets examined by a doctor when they die. Every doctor is required by law to put in a cause of death. You could be 105 and puttering in the garden, and the doc must put "Heart Failure" as the cause of death, because that's all he's got for a "natural death" and not putting a cause in there is not legal. Since women's bodies are designed for survival, it's the heart that gets them in their 70's, 80's, 90's and post 100's.
This has a side effect of making death stats from heart disease higher than they sensibly should be, and Heart Foundations don't see this as a problem as it helps with fundraising. So you have to take any heart related numbers with a healthy dose of skepticism.
I'm not a doctor, but maybe because bare female chests and breasts aren't something the doctor or patient would be as comfortable with in that particular case (male doc, female patient), there is a bit of hesitation or delay. Maybe that's ridiculous, but some thoughts are...
Maybe male doctors avoid touching female patients, lest they're accused of molesting them.
This is just one datum, but when my mother had her heart attack the emergency room doctor did not believe her when she said she was having a heart attack. He told her she was having a gall bladder attack. She told him her gallbladder had been removed years earlier. He ignored her.
Four hours later she went code blue and had to be defibrillated. Only then did the doctor believe her. She survived but lived her remaining two years as an invalid.
Perhaps a female doctor would have listened to her and administered an anti-clotting agent at some point during those four hours.
Actually it's much simpler than that.
Their claim that their groups seperate out other infractions is not even basically correct.
All it takes is two biases.
For example if women having attacks are more likely to die (which they are add women tend to have them later in life) and male doctors are more likely to be given more difficult cases (which they are, as they tend to be more senior due to a longer time in the system) then we would see exactly this distribution.
How on earth a statistical paper can be published without even a basic understanding of statistics is ridiculous.
Of course the reason it can be is it's conclusion is politically motivated and happily accepted of course.
But it is not science.
Articles about OBGYNs, weddings, & baby showers? What's with these posts about female shit? Take it to another site, please.
I see you are planning a remake of "Springtime for Hitler".
Yeah, well, your "president" doesn't understand what the word "collusion" means, so kindly fuck right off.
Perhaps there is just the slightest tendency to give tougher problems to the older doctors. They happen to be male in this study. Or just massage the data until it fits your initial hypothesis.
I thought gender was a spectrum and a construct? Shows how dumb and dangerous the gender is a construct idea is.
I'd like to see better statistics. On average, a first heart attack strikes men at age 65; women, 72. A 72 year old is simply more likely to die of a heart attack than a 65 year old one; age matters. There's no surprise that women are more likely to die, and although women are more likely to die of their heart attack, men still, on the average, die earlier of heart attacks.
Except that, given female doctors for both male and female patients, women are not more likely to die. FTA:
I stand by my statement. I want to see better statistics.
...
The difference between male and female doctors is interesting, but note that the difference is actually small: according to the article, a heart attack patient dies in the ER about 11.9 percent of the time, versus 12.4 percent with female patients with male doctors [corrected from error in my original; sorry]-- the difference is one part in two hundred.
Yes, but with a study population of over half a million, that's a statistically significant difference.
No, it's not.
Work it out. They say one doctor in four are women. Half of the patients are women. So the actual study population of women patients treated by women doctors is one eighth of the total-- that's 62,000, not half a million. The deaths in the ER are 12%: 7.5 thousand. Square root of that is 86, for statistical variance (Poisson statistics) of 1.1 percent.
So difference of one in two hundred is NOT statistically significant.
It's actually worse statistics than that, since they have split the data into many tranches. There are four groups (male doctor, male patient; male doctor, female patient; female doctor, male patient; female doctor, female patient). Thus there are four ways to compare one subgroup against the average, plus three ways to compare subsets of data (effect male doctors, effect of female doctors, effect of same-sex doctor)-- seven possible comparisons to check against the null hypothesis. Statistically, that's only four degrees of freedom (because the comparisons have overlap)-- but still, you have four times higher possibility of false positive, and thus need four times higher statistical significance to pull signal out of the noise.
(This xkcd is a primer on why multiple comparisons in a group increase the possibility of false positive: https://xkcd.com/882/ ).
The big confounding effect here is age in doctors, not just patients: on the average, female doctors are younger than male doctors, and thus more recently educated and presumably up to date on the most modern techniques. I'd like to see that effect accounted for.
That would be a really great point, except it runs into the same flaw as your first argument: there was no difference in death rates between male doctors-male patient and female doctor-male patient. If female doctors were more recently educated and up to date on the most modern techniques and that made a difference, you'd expect to see the female doctor-male patient death rate be lower. But it's not. Both of your arguments have a fundamental flaw that suggest you didn't really read the article summary, much less the article: your first argument requires a premise that women are more likely to die than men regardless of the gender of their doctor; and your second argument requires a premise that female doctors are less likely to have patients die regardless of the gender of their patient. But neither of those are true - this study found an increased death rate only when two variables coincide: female doctor and female patient.
Your point would be interesting if the statistics were convincing, but they're not.
The statistics would have to be much more convincing for your analysis to hold, since if the older patient eff
I have been going through the Scientific American article here and the cited source here and I don't understand where the data comes from: the cited article never mentions the gender of the doctor.
Not only that, but Brad Greenwood, who is cited as one of the authors of the study that brings the disparity to light, is nowhere to be found in the cited article.
If these claims are not completely made up, there is at least a big case of "Citation needed".
Women empathize
Men sympathize
Casteism
Personally, I think that even though Men and Women aren't that different, that slight difference can make a huge difference in our perspectives. I can't relate to something that I'm physically incapable and I'm sure it works both ways. I'm just throwing out a thought here, but if how we communicate with each other is influenced by our physical differences. I know that women can offer me insights on this that I tend to miss, dismiss or find irrelevant. Women can point these things out to me and justify them enough for me to accept. It may be that we are really listening to each other and it just that what was said went right over our head.
Do Colorless Green Ideas Sleep Furiously?
Anxiety reduces chance of life.