WOMEN DOCTORS Are Under Greater Pressure.

• Position: Female physicians face time pressure and problems with psycho social issues - Brief Article

Women physicians treat just as many patients with complex medical problems as their male counterparts, but carry a heavier burden when it comes to handling psychosocial issues such as depression, anxiety, eating disorders, and "somatization," a condition in which people complain of aches and pains with no apparent physiological cause. Moreover, even though people with psychosocial issues require more time to evaluate and treat, women doctors over all were allotted less time with new patients. These findings come from the Physician Worklife Study. based on a survey of 6,100 male and female physicians from a range of specialties.

Female general internists (doctors who provide comprehensive medical care to adults) reported that 36% of their patients had complex psychosocial issues, compared to 27% of those who saw male general internists, a difference described as "clinically meaningful and statistically significant" by Mark Linzer, the principal investigator and head of the general internal medicine section at the University of Wisconsin Medical School, Madison. Almost all the physicians said they felt time pressure, defined as the percentage of additional time needed to provide quality patient care. Both male and female doctors indicated needing about 42 minutes for new patients. When it came to actual time allotted, however, male physicians were given 38 minutes, while women were given 34.

"It's amazing what you can do with just a few extra minutes," Linzer points out. "It is important that patients be listened to by their physicians. When the time available is cut by five or 10 minutes, the first thing that goes is listening to patients' concerns, especially the psychosocial issues, even though these are terribly important."

Women physicians actually may need more time than their male counterparts, researchers say. Not only do female doctors see more patients with psychosocial issues, they see more women who come in for wellness care, such as mammograms and pelvic exams. Male patients, on the other hand, don't typically come in for wellness care until about age 50.

"What happens is you deal with a woman's chest pain and her abdominal pain and her irritable bowel, but you also deal with her request to talk about hormone replacement therapy, her worries about breast cancer, and her psychosocial issues. And all that...