Letter
to the Editor
Primary Care June 2005
To the Editor:
I would like Dr Nolan to consider
“patient safety” to be his cornerpiece—
not access. There is no
access problem until we are all
out of business. Patient safety
debunks the myth that tort law is
a patient safety system.
JOHN LEWIS, MD
Waterbury, Conn
To the Editor:
Every issue contains the section on
“What Your Patients Are Reading,”
and in the April issue, one of
the magazines that you covered
was Glamour.
Glamour is a magazine that promotes
gender bias against male
physicians, especially male gynecologists.
This was reported in the
November 2004 Journal of
Obstetrics and Gynecology.1
When the writers for Glamour
print an article relating to obstetrics
and gynecology, they identify
the gender of an obstetrician/ gynecologist
to be a female in 86% of
the cases with 14% of the descriptive
terms being gender-neutral. As
also noted in the above journal
article, when the gender of a physician
other than obstetrician/gynecologist
was identified as male, that
physician was portrayed in a negative
light 100% of the time.
The writing staff of Glamour is
also involved in the disturbing
practice of changing gender-neutral
quotes of physicians to female
specific quotes.
The April 2004 issue of Cosmopolitan
ran an article entitled
“The Bad Things Some Doctors
Do,”2 which described the sexual
misconduct of only male physicians.
Although obstetrician/
gynecologists were the main focus
of the article, the male family
practitioner was also painted as a
person to be suspected, as noted
by the following quote:
But it’s just not gynecologists who
are crossing the line. Trusted family
docs, often taking advantage of a
long-term patient-physician relationship,
have been charged with crimes.
In these cases, victims are often
unsure of what to do because they
don’t expect their doctor to behave
malevolently towards them.2
I think it is time for the editors of
The Female Patient to consider
identifying and reporting to its
readership articles that portray
male physicians, and especially
male obstetrician/gynecologists, in
a negative light. Since this is
very destructive to the patientphysician
relationship, it is essential
that physicians are made
aware of “What Your Patients
Are Reading”.
LARRY KINCHELOE, MD
Oklahoma City, Okla
References
- Kincheloe LR. Gender bias against
male obstetrician-gynecologists in
women’s magazines. Obstet Gynecol.
2004;104(5 Pt 1):1089-1093.
- Cooper A. The bad things some doctors
do. Cosmopolitan. 2005;238(4):
150-153.
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