Social science & medicine
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Social science & medicine · Sep 1997
Gender differences in medical treatment: the case of physician-prescribed activity restrictions.
A growing scientific literature highlights concern about the influence of social bias in medical care. Differential treatment of male and female patients has been among the documented concerns. Yet, little is known about the extent to which differential treatment of male and female patients reflects the influence of social bias or of more acceptable factors, such as different patient preferences or different anticipated outcomes of care. ⋯ Female patients exhibit more illness behavior than males, and these behaviors increase physicians' tendency to prescribe activity restrictions. After accounting for illness behavior differences and all other factors, the odds of prescribed activity restrictions among female patients of male physicians is four times that of equivalent male patients of those physicians. Medical practice, education, and research must strive to identify and remove the likely unconscious role of social bias in medical decision making.
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Social science & medicine · Sep 1997
The ethics of euthanasia--attitudes and practice among Norwegian physicians.
The ethical guidelines of the Norwegian Medical Association strongly condemn physician participation in euthanasia and assisted suicide. A previous study on attitudes towards euthanasia in the Norwegian population, however, indicates that a substantial part of the population is quite liberal. This study explores Norwegian physicians' attitudes towards and experience with end of life dilemmas. ⋯ Seventeen percent answered yes to a question of whether a physician should have the opportunity to actively end the life of a terminal patient in great pain who requests this help, while 4% agreed that the same could be done to a chronically ill patient with great pain and a poor quality of life who otherwise would have several more years to live. Six percent of the physicians had performed actions intended to hasten a patient's death, while 76% said that they at least once had treated patients even if they had felt that treatment should have been discontinued. A multiple logistic regression analysis showed that internal medicine specialists, surgeons and psychiatrists were significantly more restrictive than their colleagues in laboratory specialties, and that physicians educated abroad and those with negative attitudes towards patient autonomy had more liberal attitudes towards euthanasia, when gender and time since graduation from medical school were controlled for.