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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.
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?
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.
Maybe male doctors are scared of the rape accusation if touching a female patient...
But I guess we'll have to make sure that they're not learning from predominantly male diagnosticians.
That's more like a 4% rise, not a 12% rise. Overstating threefold much?
To be fair, the mathematical blunders only occur in TFA, not in the original report.
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.
It's odd that you don't see that it would still be the same study. Men survive more than women if the doctor is male, and women survive more than men if the doctor is female. There's plenty for both party's fanatics to be butt-hurt about, I guess you just decided to pick one.
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?
A common mistake on /., conflating increase in risk with increase in occurrence probability.
CPR is not used for mycoardial infarction. The heart stopping, such as from atrial tachycardia, is treatable with CPU. CPR is quite dangerous, it tends to break ribs and is not that efficient. The mortality rate for CPR is also quite high: if you ever perform CPR in the field, it's important not to blame yourself personally if it fails, even if you made small mistakes. Only roughly 1/3 of CPR patients survive.
Myocardial Infarctions are tissue death in the heart, caused by a blockage. They're typically painful because muscle tissue in the heart is _dying_. Many people have survived numerous small infarctions. ECG's, however, electro cardiograms, where electrodes are placed on the chest and a few elsewhere on the body to monitor heart activity, does involve at least opening up the shirt and exposing the chest.
Also, many patients are quite frightened in the emergency room. I can easily picture a frightened, older female patient, who grew up more than 50 years ago, being less frightened and less reluctant to share their full medical information with a male physician, and their family or caregivers less able to communicate with a male physician.
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.
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.
The best I have ever heard is that women are smaller and weaker than men because we systematically and deliberately underfed them throughout the whole of history. I wonder why female chimps are smaller and weaker (and just about every other animal); that patriarchy goes a long way it seems!
BTW, according to Wikipedia there was a society that gave poorer food to women and in this society women did live shorter than men. Guess which society was that? Athens. The city state, that is. Yes, the fathers of democracy. The Spartans had better eugenics program --> they did not allow teenage pregnancy which was an amazing insight for those times. They'd also allow, in exceptional cases, polygamy in light of the numerous young widows among the warrior class. But then, there were other issues in their society (e.g. slavery) that were not so great...
It is absolutely ridiculous that the most privilege group of people in history (white western women) who are surrounded by endless invisible walls of protection and comfort (provided mostly my men), who rubbed their backsides on the banks of the best universities never seen a day of hardship, while their peers in the rest of the world were working full time jobs (sometimes more than one) and rising a family (just ask what my mother or grandmothers think about those screeching harpies...be prepared for the c-word to be mentioned repeatedly) are now declaring the world to the most horrific of places, their position to be one of victimhood and oppression while opening the doors (and legs) to cultures that are decades behind the West in terms of equal treatment of different people (who are the greatest homophobes in the world - Africans and Arabs! The stories I have heard from white, gay South Africans...wow man, just wow!).
In my worst nightmares I could not imagine that the West would come to this. All those years I am here (17), among you, I was worried about the rednecks, the ultra-religious creationists, the "foking banksters", the 1%, the mafia that is the energy industry (oil, gas), food, medicine, cosmetics and so on....anyone can see my /. post history.....and now my own people (the left, don't blame me, I can't help it, no way you can be conservative with extrovert and openness score in the 95 percentile range) betrayed me and became anti-science, anti-free speech, anti-reality for fuck's sake! I am ashamed of myself, that I missed that transformation for many years (yes, I did have horrendous personal problems so I let everything else slide, including political analysis, but still....) and repeated for a while the bulshit without checking the facts...well we live and learn I guess.
I am well aware where the division in groups and the oppressed-oppressor narrative lead. So, westerners, pick your ultimate destiny --> fascist labor camps, or communist Gulags. You don't have a third option since the silent majority happily/docilly allowed the nutters from both sides to hijack the political discourse, the mainstream media, the educational system and so on...now 2 generations have been screwed already. We will harvest what we sow. Good luck!
It is not the same thing. More men die from heart attacks, yes, but that number is not affected by the doctor's gender. It is only the female mortality figure from heart attack that is affected by the doctor's gender.
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.
The corollary to "those in power are men" is that "those destitute and homeless" are typically men too.
And the latter group is far larger.
Hey at least it wasn't an article about who Trump was trolling today.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
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
Someone else pointed out his behaviour a few months back and I haven't stopped noticing it.
"Imagine how outraged people I disagree with would be if the facts didn't support their case."
Yeah... some rethinking may be in order.
Your wife should have gotten a skill set that actually pays. That is her fault, not societies. I work in a fortune 100 company. Guess what numb nuts. The women make just as much, and hold as many positions or more then men. They don't have it any worse.
Anonymous comments are as pathetic as the anonymous "sources" that contaminate gutless journalism from the New York Time
200% Wrong.
It's Republicans of today who are fundamentally distorting the Bill of Rights with their kooky concepts like how their "religious liberty" means they can deny others access to prescription medicines, how they can compel people to participate in their feigned displays of "patriotism" and of course, how they can be the victim when they aren't allowed to oppress and deny the civil rights of others.
Sad to see their party corrupted by the malignant influence that used to control the Democrats.
SAD!!
Doing manual labor is not a hardship you keyboard warrior weanie.
I object to power without constructive purpose. --Spock
What was not usable from the Veterans Affairs data sets?
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
"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.
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.
Then no one would click on the article and erupt into a flurry of angry comments--the only kind of comments that are worth money.
I object to power without constructive purpose. --Spock
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
Guess which society was that? Athens. The city state, that is. Yes, the fathers of democracy.
You mean supposedly democratic oligarchy. You had to be a racially-privileged male landowner to have a vote. They had an upper social class that was in charge of everything. Sound familiar?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Oh, well that spoils my idea. Also now I actually bother to run the scenario, people arriving at an ER with a heart attack will, presumably, usually be either elderly or have weight/heart related issues, so attractive women being uppity probably wouldn't happen that often. They'd most likely also arrive by ambulance, in a collapsed state; so what I'm thinking here now, could be some kind of mother issue perhaps? Male doctors have a harder time fixing up elderly women, to a degree of so many % because they have mother issues?
"...no way you can be conservative with extrovert and openness score in the 95 percentile range)"
That you would provide such a gut wrenching and honest reveal of your complete lack of understanding is admirable. Most people cover up their flaws, inconsistencies, and ignorance with savage defensiveness. I applaud you for unashamedly showing everyone your personal prejudice and self-reinforcing ignorance without trying to defend it.
If only more people would do this, just admit they are an unreliable narrator, full of flaws, inconsistencies, cognitive dissonance, emotionally motivated intentional misapprehensions, and straight out wrongheadedness the world would be a much better place.
When the only tool you have is a claw hammer every problem starts to look like the back of someone's skull.
Bingo -- and I realize the I am included in that.
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.
"You could argue that those who are very rich (those at the very, very top) are typically Jews. And that's not entirely false."
Yes, its entirely false.
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.
Some of these cases may be heart attacks, but I suspect most are actually just female hysteria.
Most chest pain in the ER turns out to be non-serious.
Still, it's to be careful as the serious cases are doozies.
200% Wrong.
It's Republicans of today who are fundamentally distorting the Bill of Rights with their kooky concepts like how their "religious liberty" means they can deny others access to prescription medicines, how they can compel people to participate in their feigned displays of "patriotism" and of course, how they can be the victim when they aren't allowed to oppress and deny the civil rights of others.
Sad to see their party corrupted by the malignant influence that used to control the Democrats.
SAD!!
Republicans don't deny access to healthcare; they just don't want to pay for others having a procedure they disagree with. I disagree with elective abortion, so I don't want my tax dollars to pay for you to have an elective abortion. I am against making abortion illegal because there are some situations I agree with abortion (such as a pregnancy which resulted from rape, or cases where either the mother's or fetus' life is in severe jeopardy). The Catholic Church is against contraceptives, so they don't want to pay from health insurance which pays for contraceptives, but that doesn't stop their employees from buying supplemental insurance or paying retail for contraceptives.
The country is so divided that you parrot your party's talking points without determining the validity of the claims.
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.
Except in real world situations the laws that republicans want on the books actually does deny access to healthcare.
If you have a law that allows any medical professional or any pharmacist to not prescribe or fill a prescription for say birth control because of their "religious beliefs" (which is happening and has happened) but that person lives in a rural area where there is only one pharmacist or doctor within a few hundred miles and there is no other way for that person to get their prescription then the end result is they are being denied access to healthcare and their rights.
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.
Maybe male doctors avoid touching female patients, lest they're accused of molesting them.
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.
Gender pay Gap is ridiculous. The Gap doesn't take into account the age and time within the company at all. Come back with some real statistics
I can't remember it, I'm not a stalker, I just googled.
It's odd that you don't see that it would still be the same study. Men survive more than women if the doctor is male, and women survive more than men if the doctor is female.
If you had bothered to read all the way too the 4th sentence of the summary, you would have seen this:
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
But why actually read what you're commenting on, right? Total waste of time.
There's plenty for both party's fanatics to be butt-hurt about, I guess you just decided to pick one.
Judging by the fact that I got modded "troll" while the jackass who couldn't even be bothered to read the fucking summary got modded "+5 insightful", I guess we know which fanatics managed to get their grubby little mitts on mod points today.
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
Okay, prove it, pick a race and provide a fixed definition without resorting to subjective identification by oneself or others... 1. 2. 3 go.
You'll fail. There are things we tend to group with loose general and incorrect perceptions of the definition of a race that are real, things like national or regional origin and culture; as well as common highly visible traits like skin color, eye shape, dna ancestry, etc. None of these define a race and at this point the genetics and nationalities are so blended in our society that if they once did it no longer matters. The truth is we have sets of characteristics we tend to lump under race categories and people just go along with what everyone around them has said when they grew up.
Legally your race is defined by self-identification because we have no way to define it. Right now we play so fast and loose with that word that it is meaningless. There are certain medical factors that go along with genetic race but the utility of considering that is no different than screening for any of the millions of genetic illnesses that don't have a high correlation to racial identification. The DNA ancestry and culture angle is highly in congruent with the way most are defining these things. For example here in the states everyone who is black is treated like a former slave and those who are former slaves are that this point genetically as much or more like their slave owner ancestors than their slave ancestors and you can't from a genetic standpoint claim one more than the other. Almost every disadvantage associated with being one of them that can actually objectively be proven can be solved in a single generation by moving outside of neighborhoods that group others with the same label together, integrating with general american culture, and hard work. In other words, those problems have to do with neighborhoods and cultures and not genetic history.
Republicans don't deny access to healthcare;
They do.
Please read the sources instead of parroting your party's talking points. South Carolina Governor Henry McMaster partially defunded Planned Parenthood. He didn't defund the entire budget because doing so would keep 700k women and children from getting prescriptions through Medicaid. This is in line with what I said. Republicans don't want to spend tax dollars on things they morally disagree with, but allow individuals to pay for the procedures themselves.
Not only that, they expressly support the idea of banning not just abortion, but their rhetoric is encouraging pharmacists to refuse to dispense medication.
That's the consequence of their "moral conscience" and "religious liberty" approach.
Again, read the source. There are a lot of slippery words such as "could be interpreted". On top of that remember that not all Republicans agree 100% on all issues. As to the "Day After" pill, it's basically a do-it-yourself-at-home abortion. I am a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. We allow contraceptives, but view elective abortion and the day after pill as sinful in most cases. You chose to have sex. You knew the possibility of a pregnancy. Even condoms fail about 1% of the time. Now live with the consequences of your choice.
they just don't want to pay for others having a procedure they disagree with.
Nope. They want to outlaw those procedures. Or even just having a miscarriage.
Sensationalism! You are being dishonest here. Read the article you linked to from Elle. The proposal would "penalize abusers for causing miscarriages". I like the phrases in Portuguese better than English, so I'll use them here. What we call miscarriage in English is a "spontaneous abortion" in Portuguese. This phrase better shows that it's the woman's body recognizing that something's wrong with the pregnancy and spontaneously terminates the pregnancy and expels the embryo / fetus (depends on stage of development). Under the proposal, inducing an abortion would be criminal. Again, different factions within the party want different things.
I disagree with elective abortion, so I don't want my tax dollars to pay for you to have an elective abortion.
And I don't want my tax dollars wasted opposing a person getting an abortion that's being paid for privately.
Are you going to refund me? No? Why not?
How about the thousands of other things I don't want the government doing with my tax dollars? No, you won't even listen to my grievances about the fault system of elections so I'm effectively unrepresented in those discussions?
Huh. Pardon me for giving little credence to your demands then, since you don't reciprocate.
I am against making abortion illegal because there are some situations I agree with abortion (such as a pregnancy which resulted from rape, or cases where either the mother's or fetus' life is in severe jeopardy).
As Republicans will tell you, those are
Way to avoid the OP's point, insult the OP AND blame the victim all at the same time! Well done there!
This comment is my opinion and does not represent an official position of Donald Trump or others I do not work for
You'll contrive just about anything to justify your racism, won't you, AC?
FWIW, part of the suicide difference is that women are less likely than men to use *lethal* methods. The ratio of *attempts* is I think much different than that of deaths.
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?