The influence of patient and physician gender on prescription of psychotropic drugs

Abstract

There is a wealth of evidence that more psychotropic drugs are prescribed to female than to male patients. We studied the psychotropic drug prescription of 15 male and 9 female physicians to 2493 patients in the Ambulatory Care Clinic of a University hospital. The relative odds (RO) of benzodiazepine prescription to a female compared to a male patient was the same when the physician was a male or a female (adjusted RO: 1.8; 95% CL: 1.5-2.1). But female patients were significantly more likely to be prescribed psychotropic drugs of all types from a female than from a male physician (adjusted RO: 1.3; 95% CL: 1.0-1.7). Information on patient diagnosis or on severity of symptoms would be needed to determine whether the present results reflect gender differences in medical care needs, overprescription of psychotropic drugs to females or underprescription of psychotropic drugs to males.