News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on Women Die More from Heart Attacks Than Men Unless ER Doc Is Female. Parent comment

Re:Women Die More from Heart Attacks Than Men Unless ER Doc ... by jwaggie on Monday August 06, 2018 @04:35PM (#17701569)
The preceding sentence says "If a heart attack patient is a woman and her emergency physician is a man, he says, her risk of death suddenly rises by about 12 percent."

The 11.9 percent mentioned in your quote refers to probability of death for the population (i.e. a random person where the gender of the patient and the doctor is unknown).

The 12.4 percent refers to probability of death for a woman given a male doctor. If that is 12 percent higher, as the quote above says, then the probability of death for a woman given a female doctor is about 11.07%

So its an increase of 1.3 percentage points. The article kind of obfuscates that though.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Women Die More from Heart Attacks Than Men Unless ER Doc ... by autokad on Monday August 06, 2018 @05:13PM (#17701828)
I am willing to bet once you account for other things, such as geography, the effect goes away.

Look at the map at the end. It clearly shows women being higher percentage in areas that have better mortality rates for heart disease which are both heavily influenced by access (response time) to medical care and other socioeconomic factors

this is not perfect, but it shows that other factors are probably more likely to be the reason other than jumping to conclusions about which sex is a better doctor.

https://www.kff.org/other/state-indicator/medical-school-gra...

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Women Die More from Heart Attacks Than Men Unless ER Doc ... by pessimizer on Monday August 06, 2018 @05:25PM (#17701912)
> jumping to conclusions about which sex is a better doctor.

I don't believe that many people are even suggesting this conclusion.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Women Die More from Heart Attacks Than Men Unless ER Doc ... by jgowdy on Monday August 06, 2018 @08:50PM (#17703054)
Unfortunately, outside of more rational circles, I believe a significant number of people will in fact draw some kind of inaccurate and superficial conclusion from this data.
[ Parent | on HN ]