A physician’s gender may make a difference when it comes to who is the better doctor at getting patients to control their diabetes, announced new study findings issued by the University of Montreal and reported by Time.com.

For the study, researchers solicited 870 doctors who treated diabetes patients in Quebec. One half of the physicians were male and the other half women. To determine whether gender affected patient behavior, scientists evaluated male and female doctors in three areas of standard diabetes care. Those areas included docs ordering periodic eye exams and frequent physical check-ups and also maintaining a mix of different meds prescribed for their patients.

Findings showed that female doctors won in all areas. The reason is very simple. It’s because female physicians were more apt to devote more time to their patients, scientists said. (Male docs tended to rush their patients through an appointment. Possibly, this is because they treated, on average, 1,000 more cases than female docs.)

In the future, the Montreal researchers plan to see if they find gender-based differences among doctors who treat patients with other manageable conditions including hypertension, asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.

One previous study also showed that diabetes patients would have better health outcomes if docs didn’t aggressively prescribe meds just to reach a blood pressure target.

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