Physician, Thy Name Is Woman : A Group of Orange County Female Doctors Has Formed Athena Medical in the Belief Many Will Seek Them Out

The 31-year-old woman, we’ll call her Terry, said she goes to woman doctors exclusively. Wouldn’t think of going to a man.

Why? “You want it blunt? Men don’t have cramps. I say, ‘This is killing me. Gimme a prescription,’ and he says, ‘Aw, it’s not that bad.’ They don’t know.

“I’ve had male doctors in the past, but I think it’s the empathy. You just feel you can relate to a woman doctor better.”

A group of women doctors in Orange County is betting there are lots of women like Terry out here. They’ve banded together to create what may be the first woman’s old-boy network in American medicine.

Calling themselves Athena Medical but still practicing in their independent offices, they promise to refer patients among themselves and help shoulder at least the initial costs of advertising. They say they want men as well as women for patients. But when it comes to member doctors, “we’d like only females,” said one network member. “That will make us exclusive. It will give us an edge, we think.”

“If they’re not the first, they’re sure on the cutting edge,” says Bob Bohlmann, director of consulting for the nonprofit Medical Group Management Assn. “It’s a good idea. I think they’ve got something.”

All-woman practices are not new. For years, groups of female doctors have practiced obstetrics and gynecology in partnership, and many such practices are flourishing. The Doctor’s Office for Women in Newport Beach has six woman physicians and sees around 100 patients a day.

But Athena Medical is aimed at patients who want woman doctors regardless of the field. The network offers family practice and pediatrics as well as some specialties, such as ophthalmology, dermatology and podiatry.

Advertising will be aimed at both men and women, but doctors expect most patients will be women, at least in the near future.

“It’s a general thing: The male doesn’t need a doctor until he’s around 40 or 50, if he’s healthy,” says Grace Imbastari, a Santa Ana internist and network member. “But the woman needs a doctor after the age of 20 (when regular testing for uterine cancer begins).

“The husband usually accompanies her, and if they like the physician, he becomes a patient, too. But women usually make the choice of physician. Then they sort of drag their husbands in for attention.”

Imbastari says about 20% of her patients are male, but others in the network report up to 30%.

So far, 16 medical doctors, an osteopath, a podiatrist, a dietitian and a social worker have joined the network. Their offices extend from Newport Beach to Placentia. One of the physicians has 25 years in private practice, two others have 11 and 10 years. The rest average somewhat more than three years.

All are on the staff of Western Medical Center-Santa Ana, which means many of their patients will wind up admitted to that hospital. In hopes of that, Western Med has offered to do some of the network’s administrative chores and to pay for part of the network’s direct-mail advertising.

The mail campaign begins next week. “We’re targeting approximately 50,000 people, a mix of both male and female population in the different ZIP codes around our members’ offices,” says Melissa Christian, Western Med’s director of medical staff development.

While women 18 to 55 will receive the advertising postcards, “for men we’re targeting only 34 to 55,” Christian says. “We’re sensitive to the fact that some very young males may not be comfortable with women physicians.”

The postcards stress that the network is “unique” but only refer to “a network of women physicians” in small print beside the network logo.

The emphasis is on describing the doctors as “committed to giving you the kind of personal health care that has almost disappeared from modern medicine.” A second mailing will urge people to call for the network’s directory, in which the all-woman membership will be obvious.

The oblique approach was “extremely intentional,” Christian says. Concern about provoking a male backlash within the profession was significant enough to prevent at least one woman surgeon from joining. “The O.R. (operating room) is the last bastion of male chauvinism in medicine,” Christian says.

“Clearly, the angle for the network is it’s all women, but we took the text very gently. The doctors are concerned about reaction from their peers, and we were also concerned about Medicare laws about discrimination. Oddly, these laws were passed in the ‘60s to prevent discrimination against females.

“I went through counsel on this, and we’ve intentionally kept it informal. That’s why there are no bylaws or contracts. Everyone keeps her own office. There’s no profit for the network itself. We’ll treat males and females. I don’t see any way anyone can charge discrimination.”

Terence Maloy, a Laguna Hills dermatologist and president of the Orange County Medical Assn., says the all-woman network is unlikely to prompt any reaction from male physicians. “Since women have felt excluded from the corridors of power in medicine for so long, I sort of doubt there will be anything said.”

Maloy practices with his daughter, and patients sometimes ask for her because she’s female, he says. “You can’t be too thin-skinned about this. I know lots of woman doctors, and many think they do offer something different than a male doctor does. It’s so subjective, there’s no way to prove it one way or the other.”

According to Bohlmann, there’s no precedent to guide the doctors along this path. “I’ve seen this type of thing develop in some places in an informal way, but I’ve never seen anything advertised like this,” he says.

“In marketing, we have what we call differentiation. You do something different, unique, and that has a certain appeal. A good analogy are the old-time, all-female bands.

“Females prefer female physicians--at least many of them do. Female doctors generally are pretty busy, and most of their patients are female.

“What makes this feasible now is that there are more female doctors in practice and in specialties.”

According to the American Medical Assn., the number of woman physicians caring for patients in the United States has increased nearly 450% since 1970.

That year, only one in 15 doctors was female--about 18,000 in all. But last year the number of women doctors topped 100,000 for the first time. Now about one in five physicians caring for patients is a woman.

One of them, Eva E. Katz, an Irvine family physician, approached Christian at Western Med with the idea of creating the Athena network.

“This idea was coming for a long, long time,” says Katz. When it came time to refer patients to specialists, more and more of her patients were asking to be sent to women specialists, she says. “People are recognizing that women physicians spend more time with people. Call it a motherly touch.”

Women physicians are better? “No, not better, but they are different,” says Imbastari. “It’s a very personal thing. It varies woman to woman. Women tend to listen more. They’re not overpowering, not dominating. They have more patience, I think. I think they’re able to express that they care. Sometimes men think they have to be the typical male model. I’d say a majority of women do not feel comfortable with male physicians.”

Bohlmann says the marketplace will decide the truth of that premise, and he and others will be interested in the outcome. “In medicine, California is the trend-setter. Things happen there first.”