2024-08-15
6 分钟The Economist. Hello, this is Alok Jha,
host of Babbage, our weekly podcast on science and technology.
Welcome to Editor's Picks.
We've chosen an unmissable article from the latest edition of The Economist.
Please do have a listen.
Many factors can influence whether a patient lives or dies,
the quality of the drugs they receive, for example,
the rigor with which their symptoms are monitored, or,
more surprisingly, the gender of the attending physician.
In data from a host of different countries,
patients seen by female doctors seem to do better than those seen by male ones.
Why, though, remains mysterious.
One of the first studies to examine the issue was published in 2017 in the journal Jamma Internal Medicine by Yusuke Sugawa of Harvard Medical School and colleagues based in Boston.
The authors analyzed the medical records of around 1.5 million older adults who had been hospitalized in America between 2011 and 2014.
They found that patients whose primary treatment had been performed by a female doctor were roughly 4% less likely to die and 4% less likely to be readmitted to hospital in the following 30 days than those whose primary doctor was a man.
The beneficial effect on mortality is comparable to that of being hospitalized in 2013 rather than 2003,
with all the accompanying improvements in treatments and technology.
Later, in 2017,
another study published in BMJ by a separate group of Canadian and American researchers searched for similar trends following surgery.
They examined the outcomes of 100,000 patients who had operations in Ontario between 2007 and 2015,