Gender-Specific Aspects of the Physician-Patient Interaction

This article aims at shedding light on the role of physician and patient gender in the medical consultation. Because of the scarce amount of studies concentrating on gender aspects of the physician-patient interaction in rehabilitation or chronic disease, mostly results from general medicine are reported. Female physicians have a more emotional and less dominant communication style. Female patients bring up more psychosocial topics and disclose more information about themselves in general. Both female and male physicians give more information and apply a more partnership-oriented communication style when seeing a female patient. Female and male patients communicate more partnership-oriented with female physicians and share more psychosocial and medical information with them. Same-gender dyads seem beneficial most of the time for physician-patient communication. Mixed-gender dyads are more difficult, especially when a younger female physician sees a male patient. There is no single good communication style recommendable for all physicians. Rather, the research results presented should be applied to communication trainings for physicians. This could provide physicians with a flexible choice of communication styles to apply according to different situations.