> The researchers divided 500,000-plus cases into four categories: male doctors treating men; male doctors treating women; female doctors treating men; and fema

> 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,” > Female doctors may also simply be performing at least some parts of the job better than their male counterparts do. In the new study everyone was more likely to survive if they saw a female physician, and a study published last year in JAMA Internal Medicine indicated all patients of female physicians had lower mortality and hospital readmission rates. Both of the above findings are at least somewhat contradictory, given that the first study found no statistical difference between male-patient-outcomes when being treated by male vs female doctors. Before jumping to conclusions, I think it's worth studying this effect more rigorously first. The female cardiologist they quoted said it best: > 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. “Spurious signals sometimes come up [in research], so this should be replicated,” Or as xkcd would put it: https://xkcd.com/882/ https://xkcd.com/882/