Gender and medical communication--a review

Communication is a central part of physicians' professional activities. Encounters with good physician-patient communication have been shown to be associated with a higher degree of exchange of information, patient satisfaction, compliance and a more favourable symptoms'course, and with a lower frequency of wrong diagnoses. Gender differences in verbal behaviour and language use have been observed among physicians with regard to form and content of questions, informational manner, partnership building in the physician-patient relation, emotionally focused talk, as well as with regard to length of speech and of visits. Patient gender is associated with the readiness to discuss health issues, with experiencing health and diseases, and with variability of symptom descriptions. Gender constellations have an impact on content and interaction of discourse. Introducing a "second gender thought" on whether patient gender or own gender representations may have influenced diagnostic or therapeutic decisions might help to eventually modify such impact.