The Nature and Type of Doctors' Cultural Assumptions about Patients as Men

Abstract

In recent years medical sociologists have begun to focus less on the supposedly objective biomedical information about patients and more on doctors' perceptions of the social and contextual information about patients available to them as members of our society that may influence diagnoses and treatment decisions. One of the emerging issues has been how doctors, calling on the supposedly normative behavioral expectations for groups of patients differentiated on the basis of gender, race, age, social class and the like, create and sustain evaluative perceptions of patients and the degree to which these perceptions may influence the delivery of health care.

Using existing work that examines how doctors use cultural assumptions to typify female patients, the author in this paper examines the nature and types of cultural assumptions that doctors make about their male patients. Drawing on taped medical interviews between second- and third-year residents and forty-three male patients in a family practice clinic of a teaching hospital, the author demonstrates some of the cultural assumptions that doctors make concerning patients' race, social class position, education, income and substance use/abuse patterns.