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How a doctor votes may influence how they treat their patients, a new study suggests
The political views of doctors may influence the care they provide, a new study suggests—especially when it comes to issues that are politically fraught, like firearms and abortion.
In the new report, published Monday in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), researchers at Yale University linked records of more than 20,000 primary care doctors to a voter registration database in order to obtain the doctors’ political affiliations. They then surveyed a portion of these doctors, about 200 Democrats and Republicans, to see whether there were differences in how the doctors viewed medical cases and offered treatment.
The researchers presented the doctors with different vignettes of patient experiences. Some of the scenarios delved into issues that were more political, like abortion or marijuana use, while others related to conditions like obesity and depression. (One vignette was about a 28-year-old woman who reported having two abortions in the last five years, but had […]
This is a great example of when data meets what many of us feel/sense on an intuitive level. Of course worldview (in this case political leaning) shapes/informs how and what we do/say. While some may be intellectually aware that we all have our perspectives, and that perception forms/informs our sense of “reality,” rarely do we get a glimpse of how a person’s worldview (your doctor, your boss, your relative) then shapes our experience (and then our worldview). It goes both ways.