Is Your Doctor A Republican? The Answer May Impact Your Treatment.

Your doctor’s political views may influence how he or she talks to you about abortion and marijuana, a new study finds.

Surveying more than 200 primary care doctors in several states, Yale University researchers found that Republican and Democratic physicians respond differently to politically sensitive health issues such as abortion, marijuana use and firearm safety.

The findings suggest that even a presumably objective, science-based field such as medicine is not safe from the spillover of personal political beliefs, which, research has shown, can affect anything from consumer spending to dating to hiring.

“For a lot of people, politics affect how they make all sorts of judgments,” said political scientist Eitan Hersh, an assistant professor at Yale who co-authored the study published Oct. 3 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Hersh and his colleague, Matthew Goldenberg, found that Republican physicians were more likely to discuss the mental health aspects of abortion than their Democratic colleagues.

Republicans also tended to view marijuana smoking as a serious issue and opted to discuss the health and legal risks of marijuana with patients, urging them to cut down on smoking.

Democrats, on the other hand, were more likely than Republicans to urge patients not to store firearms at home.

“The issues we studied here are just the surface. There’s end-of-life care, LGBT health and, of course, reproductive health and drugs,” Hersh said. “Physicians, as part of [their] routine work, have to deal with a lot of issues that are politically sensitive topics.”