A study out of the University of Toronto compared surgical outcomes by the gender of patients and the gender of the surgeon. They found that for male patients, on average it doesn't matter whether the surgeon is a man or a woman. If you are a woman surgeon, your male and female patients are likely to have equivalent outcomes. But for a woman patient, the gender of the surgeon can make a difference. They found that women patients are 15% more likely to have a bad outcome with a male surgeon as compared to a female surgeon, and are 32% more likely to die if their surgeon is a man.
The study was done by analyzing records of 1.3 million patients using nearly 3,000 different surgeons. A bad outcome was defined as post-surgical complications, readmission to the hospital within a month, or death. They included 21 types of operations, from appendix removal to brain surgery.
For example, in brain and vascular surgeries, 1.2% of women who had a male surgeon died, while women who had a female surgeon saw only a 0.9% death rate. While that may seem like a small percentage, it's a significant difference. While the percentages vary, the difference in a woman's surgeon held across all types of surgery. While the researchers cannot pinpoint the reason for the difference, they offer some possibilities in an article at the Guardian. And they issued a call for more women to be trained in surgery. -via Damn Interesting
(Image credit: Samuel Bendet, US Air Force)
