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When Doctors Marry Doctors
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IN RESPONSE:
We appreciate Dr. Rollman's interest in our work and agree that readers ought not to generalize inappropriately from our data. Nonetheless, we reemphasize that young doctors married to other doctors differed substantially from their peers in many characteristics of their professional and family lives. Moreover, these differences were most marked for female physicians. The findings reported in our original paper and those of our subsequent analyses are consistent with the hypothesis that parenting triggers marked changes in professional and family roles for many physicians and that these changes may be greatest for female physicians married to physicians. Longitudinal studies would be especially useful for further clarifying the roles of gender, spouse, and children in choices young physicians make about their professional and family lives, as Dr. Rollman suggests.
Our goal was to determine differences among physicians, not to compare physicians with other professionals. We agree with Dr. Rollman that many of the issues we identified probably arise for other groups as well.
C. Seth Landefeld, MD
University of California, San Francisco; San Francisco, CA 94121
- Copyright ©2004 by the American College of Physicians
