BY KIM BELLARD
According to the old saying, sticks and stones may break your bones, but names can never hurt you. I’m not sure that still applies in a social media environment that can have real impacts on mental health of both teenagers and adults, but I have to note that healthcare seems to be pretty sensitive about who calls whom what.
I’ll start with a new study from The Mayo Clinic about whether patients addressed their physicians by their first name. It’s a tricky thing to get a gauge on; one could do surveys of both populations, or implant observers in exam rooms, but these researchers had the clever idea of examining how patients addressed their physician when using portal messaging. They looked at over 90,000 messages from nearly 15,000 patients, with about 30,000 messages from 15,000 patients including a physician’s name (first or last).
The researchers don’t seem to have provided an overall percent of patients using the doctors’ first name, but they did report:
- Female doctors were twice as likely as male doctors to be called by their first name;
- DOs were similarly almost twice as likely as MDs to have their first name used;
- Primary care doctors were 50% more likely than specialists;
- Female patients were 40% less likely to use first names when addressing their physician.