Today let’s decode a very interesting study published this month in the Journal of General Internal Medicine that is directly relevant to everyone in this community who has ever wondered whether the outcome of their appointment depended on who happened to be sitting across the desk.
Researchers at Stanford gave 1,027 primary care physicians across the United States identical clinical vignettes for five conditions: PoTS, Hashimoto’s thyroiditis, multiple sclerosis, syphilis and lupus. The only thing that changed between versions was the patient’s randomly assigned sex and race. Everything else, the symptoms, the test results, the history, was held completely constant. Then they asked the physicians to diagnose what was wrong.
PoTS had the lowest diagnostic accuracy of all five conditions. And the gap between male and female physicians was the largest for PoTS of any condition in the study.
