COLUMN: Viewpoint – The strengths of female doctors

In January of 1996 The Carillon published a full-page feature I wrote about Anna McConnell Shilstra. She practiced medicine in Steinbach from 1909-1911 and from 1920-1942. She worked with her physician husband Alexander.

To write Anna’s story I interviewed women who had been her patients. They said her medical care was quite different from her husband’s. She was much gentler and kinder, particularly in her treatment of pregnant women and sick children. Anna’s diagnostic skills also often proved more accurate than her husband’s. The people I talked with thought she was the better doctor of the two.

One story I heard was about a child who had severe burns. For two months Anna rented a horse daily so she could drive the twelve miles out to the family’s farm to change the child’s dressings. Another woman told me her baby had been born prematurely. Anna had wrapped it tenderly in cotton batten and came to check on the newborn every day.

When Anna began practicing medicine in Steinbach she was one of only a few female doctors in all of Canada. In 1959 when my Dad graduated from medicine at the University of Manitoba there was only one woman in his class of fifty. Today 45 percent of the physicians in our country are women. This growing equality in numbers of male and female doctors has led to more comparisons being drawn between them.

The Toronto Globe and Mail points out in a recent article that female physicians tend to be more empathetic than their male counterparts. They prefer to work collaboratively in teams with other doctors. They take more time to listen to their patients. They do more follow up after surgery.

A study of close to 800,000 hospital patients in the United States showed that those whose care was orchestrated by female doctors were less likely to die than those under the care of male doctors. They were also less likely to be readmitted to the hospital.

The Globe and Mail article reported on a study of some 600,000 cardiac patients admitted to emergency rooms in Florida. It found death rates of those treated by female physicians were markedly lower. A similar Canadian study in 2021 found that women operated on by a female surgeon were 25 percent less likely to die than if they were operated on by a male surgeon.

So what accounts for these differences. The theory is that female physicians get better results because they do a better job of listening to their patients. They spend more time with their patients and they engage in a lot more actual conversation with them than their male counterparts. While a male physician generally will interject his opinion and interrupt his patient after only 11 seconds of listening to their concerns, a female physician will wait a full two minutes before doing so.

Women may also bring a more creative and broader mind-set to their work since they are better than men at investing not only in their careers, but in their social and family lives as well.

When I interviewed female patients of Anna Shilstra who practiced medicine more than 80 years ago they told me they had preferred her to her husband. That kind of sentiment still holds true for women today. They prefer female physicians.

Are women better doctors than men? For some patients, in some cases, it appears they are. But what is clear is that male physicians have something to learn from their female colleagues about listening to patients, working more collaboratively, following up on cases and positively balancing their personal and work life.