In the raging battle between the sexes, it seems like the females have it over the males-at least in the healthcare setting.
In a gender-based study that aims to identify the differences of interaction between patients and doctors in France, published in Family Practice, male and female patients tend to heed to the guidance of female than male doctors in the areas of fitness, nutrition, and weight loss.
A team of researchers from France, with Dr. Anne-Cecile Schieber as the lead author, conducted a study participated by more than 500 patients and 25 doctors across three different French regions.
The findings, they turn out, were quite different from their first assumption that patients might be inclined to listen to general practitioners who belong to the same gender.
Patient-doctor interactions were better if the doctor is a female, and this tends to be true for both male and female patients. Male patients, meanwhile, are more than three times and twice likely to disagree with their male doctors in nutrition and exercise, respectively, although male patients and doctors were likely to agree when it comes to weight loss.
On the other hand, female patients working with female doctors posed a higher percentage of agreement at 93% as opposed to the 85.5% between female patients and male doctors.
Speaking with Reuters Health, Julie Schmittdiel, research scientist who had worked on similar studies (she is not part of the present French study), suggests that the difference may lie on the tendency of both providers and patients to carry on their personal backgrounds and manner of social interaction in the healthcare setting.
For the authors of this study, they pointed out the results of previous but similar studies that revealed men seemed to be more dominant to their patients while female doctors were more than likely to collaborate-that is, involving their patients in the decision-making process.
