Lower mortality, hospital readmission rates if treated by female physicians | Hacker News Reader

Lower mortality, hospital readmission rates if treated by female physicians

thenationalnews.com

40 pointswjb333 comments

I guess there might also be confounders, as the patients aren't randomized. For example, if more senior consultants are males due to a gender bias in earlier years, they may be involved in more complicated cases, and so on. Some specialities are quite gender biased, which may also impact the outcome

The difference is 0.2%. Honestly thought the difference would be much higher. I'll need to read the actual paper to get whether they found this statistically significant.

Compared with other factors like day of admission.

> Patients admitted on a Saturday and Sunday have a 10 per cent and 15 per cent higher risk of death than those admitted on a Wednesday.

But isn’t that because in weekend admits are rare and only done in serious situations where death is more likely?

It will be statisticaly significant but if there's any confounders at all it's a correlation but not necessarily causation.

They know a lot of people only read the headline, so how difficult would it have been to add five characters to the headline:

"Patients 0.2% ‘less likely to die’ if treated by a female doctor, study reveals"

It's borderline dishonest not to.

Also worth considering publication bias: any result in the other direction will not get published.

If the conclusion were the reverse then we wouldn't be reading about it.

Sure we would.

Why do you think that?

Cancel culture can ruin careers

Can you point out the last hn submission with scientific proof that men might be better than women at something? If not, is this because there's nothing men are better at, or that if there is we won't read about it?

And by "better at", I don't meant "better at being worse", I mean better in a way that is admirable.

Though in fairness this article will probably be memory holed so it can go both ways.

https://www.acpjournals.org/doi/10.7326/M23-3163

Reminder that many scientific studies turn out to not be reproducible.

That is especially true for the ones with surprising/viral results!

Now do versus race as identified in med school admissions. I'm curious if the variance in entry standards vs race poison the well for certain professionals.

How would you control for idiot racists who believed they were getting a lower standard of care from certain ethnicities and ensuing psychosomatic effects?

How did they control for idiot bigots who believed they were getting a lower standard of care from certain gender and ensuing psychosomatic effects?

They don't, but as they're not looking to link it to "variance in entry standards vs race [that] poison the well", they don't need to control for it: bigotry being a possible explanation for their findings would be a reasonable conclusion.

That's a good question. Since, IIRC, men in professional positions tend to score higher on perceived competence, it'd be actually even more damning if they didn't control for that properly.

Mortality is unambiguous

Maybe - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8302433/

I suppose the same way they controlled for idiot bigots in this study.

Since the outcome measure is mortality, someone would have to be super racist to die in order to prove a point. All joking aside, you could look at patients who are unconscious who never see the race or gender of the physician, and stuff like that. These are solvable problems and people have been doing useful studies with racist participants for decades.

> someone would have to be super racist to die in order to prove a point

I don't think that's true. Seeking a second opinion based on the race of the first doctor, variable treatment compliance by race of prescriber, willingness to discuss and understand a condition, poorer quality concordance, declining to follow a referral to a specialist of a certain race, etc, are all examples of "small" decisions someone could take based on racism that would likely show up in aggregate in mortality outcomes.

It is the same as female CEOs. They have a higher ROI and better stats for companies overall. I think it is so much harder for a woman to become a senior anything, the better people self-select.

In risk management is it easier to avoid wipe-outs and so the returns are better.

Anecdotally, women care more about strangers than men do. Men also go along with my amoral schemes much more than women do.

Any amoral schemes you care to share with the class?

Makes sense. Female professionals generally have to work harder to overcome gender biases that are still frustratingly prevalent in society.

And I assume that those biases are more pronounced in older populations which make up the bulk of healthcare patients, which could make the above need to work harder even more pronounced, maybe?

So many noisy data inputs here its hard to draw meaningful conclusions

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