06/16/2026
She was so sure she was the slow one that she asked her own employer to run a time study on her. She watched her male colleagues leave clinic at 5 or 5:30 while she stayed for hours after, and she needed to know what was wrong with her.
The verdict came back. She was highly efficient. Fast. Her notes were so thorough the reviewer said a scribe would actually be a downgrade.
The problem was never her.
Noemi Adame, MD is a pediatrician with more than twenty years in medicine.
Research keeps finding the same thing: having a female doctor is better for your health. Lower mortality. Fewer readmissions. Better outcomes across multiple fields. It is just not better for hers.
Portal data shows the truth. Patients and staff make 25 percent more requests of female primary care doctors than male ones. The extra inbox messages, the extra refills, the extra forms. All uncompensated. All invisible. Work that no metric counts and no one rewards.
And it does not stay at the office. Two years ago, Noemi's mother died suddenly. Noemi owned the practice. She was the boss. And she showed no compassion to herself. She sat in the ICU watching her mother die while she answered patient texts and sent refills to the pharmacy.
That is what years of socialization does. Women put the needs of others first, and in medicine that instinct gets magnified until a daughter cannot put down her phone at her own mother's bedside.
She respects her male colleagues. She says so plainly. This was never about them. It is about a compensation system that counts how many patients you see in a day and never once counts the 25 percent.
Afterward she rebuilt everything. Restructured her workflow. Hired help. Outsourced her social media to her daughter, who she calls the family's favorite nepo baby. And she retrained her patients to expect a few hours for a reply instead of a few minutes, because she finally learned that no is a complete sentence.
There is a recent JAMA study she keeps coming back to. Generally, women outlive men. Among physicians, that advantage disappears.
It is the title of her article for a reason. Having a female doctor is better for your health. Better for your health. Not for hers.
Listen to the full conversation on The Podcast by KevinMD. Link in the comments.
