3 ms·

As someone who can't read the full text(and it isn't on sci-hub yet), is it possible that male doctors and female doctors are attracted to different specialties

• PeterisP 5y ago
  There are all kinds of potential confounders, for example in other analysis of surgeries we sometimes see that senior surgeons get worse results than less experienced surgeons because senior surgeons take on all the non-standard risky cases and leave routine operations to less experienced surgeons; however, aspects like this and also "male doctors and female doctors are attracted to different specialties" would not adequately explain that the correlation is specific to female patients. One thing that has been studied and plausibly seems relevant is the issue that (at least earlier, perhaps this has improved after criticism) often when teaching internal anatomy, the male body is implicitly considered as "the default" and female specifics are (were?) looked at only with respect to the reproductive system, while in reality there are all kinds of average differences; the same applies to all kinds of drugs which often are tested only on males for efficiency (and later on everyone for safety, incl teratogenic issues) simply assuming that the effectiveness and side effects are the same for everyone, which is known not to be fully true. So it may be that doctors out of med school are literally a bit less prepared to handle female bodies than male ones. However, that would apply to both male and female doctors equally, so that's not a good explanation as well.