Prescribing drugs to men and women.

This article examines how often physicians prescribe therapeutic drugs to men and women who present the same complaints or receive the same diagnoses. Data are from the 1975 National Ambulatory Medical Care Survey and pertain to visits made by U.S. adults to office-based physicians that year. For most common complaints and diagnoses, women receive prescriptions more often than men do. The differences are on the small side (1 to 18% more of women's visits result in prescriptions than men's), but they are very persistent across a wide variety of health problems. Medical differences between men and women patients do not explain this. Controlling for medically relevant factors (patient age, seriousness of the problem, presence of an illness/injury or not, prior visit status, acute vs. chronic problem), the sex differences persist. Women are especially likely to get prescriptions during visits for weight gain/obesity and visits classed as observation without need for further care. The results suggest that psychosocial factors may help explain why women receive prescriptions more often during office visits than men do. Those factors could stem from patient behaviors such as overt requests for drug therapy or from physician behaviors such as sex-biased prescribing.