> The researchers divided 500,000-plus cases into four categories: male doctors treating men; male doctors treating women; female doctors treating men; and female doctors treating women. “All of those are statistically indistinguishable except for male doctor–female patient,” says Brad Greenwood, an author on the study and a data scientist at the University of Minnesota.
No, it just means in this study's data, there was no statistically significant signal that there was a difference between the groups treated by a male doctor vs a female doctor.
That doesn't mean there's not a difference in outcomes, just that one isn't suitably demonstrated by this data, but it's also a result over a completely different subset of the population than was looked at by the study in the GP's link (which was of hospitalized Medicare patients age 65 or over).
"In the new study everyone was more likely to survive if they saw a female physician, and a study(1) published last year in JAMA Internal Medicine indicated all patients of female physicians had lower mortality and hospital readmission rates. “It seems that the female doctors practice in a better way or outperform male doctors,” says the JAMA study’s first author, Yusuke Tsugawa, an assistant professor of medicine at the David Geffen School of Medicine at University of California, Los Angeles."
1) https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/fullar...