Ridiculous Study of the Week: Female ED Physicians and MIs
A recent study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences states “women who show up in the emergency department with a heart attack are less likely to die if they are treated by a female physician rather than a male.” Investigators who looked at data on nearly 582,000 heart attack patients found that women treated by male physicians were 1.52 percent less likely to survive than men treated by female physicians.
1.52%
I will not get into the whys or hows or repercussions of the study. When I clicked on this article, I thought the numbers would be really impressive and would make me rethink things. All I realized was that this WHOLE study was created as clickbait to cause controversy. And you can see how the headlines already are spreading this garbage.
1.52% is nothing. Nothing. And yet it will cause tons of fights between docs trying to defend their gender position. Please don’t buy into it.
And the worst thing is that our taxes probably paid for this crap.
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I’ve advised all of my male surgical residents here at the VA to consider gender reassignment surgery in order to reduce mortality rates in our patients.
Sir Geon of Bones, an evidence based orthopaedic surgeon teaching science based medicine
It’s behind a paywall. Wanted to see the math. I am guessing that the 95% confidence intervals overlap and the difference is actually insignificant. These studies are notoriously poor at understanding math, they think only the mean matters.
Sooo, what happens with male MI patients and female docs?
Absolutely right, Dr. Doug. The false precision of results expressed to the second decimal place deserves an eye roll, too. I can’t imagine ANY study of human behavior or clinical outcomes that could yield trustworthy two-place results.