What is it about?
This study looked at how a surgeon's voice, specifically its pitch (how high or low it sounds) and whether the surgeon is male or female, can affect how patients feel about their medical care and their surgeon. We recorded actors playing the role of a surgeon reading the same medical script, then altered the pitch of those recordings to sound higher or lower. Over 2,500 volunteers listened to one of these recordings and then rated the surgeon on qualities like friendliness, competence, experience, and whether they would recommend that surgeon to others. We found that the sound of a surgeon’s voice shapes first impressions, affecting how experienced, caring, or confident they seem, even though overall patient satisfaction scores remained similar across genders.
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Why is it important?
This research highlights that subtle, non-medical factors like voice can influence patient perceptions in healthcare settings, an important insight as hospitals increasingly use patient feedback to evaluate quality of care, especially in the field of surgery.
Perspectives
Writing this article meant a lot to me, as many of my co-authors and I identify as underrepresented in ENT. As the field of surgery becomes more diverse, academic institutions need to take this into account when evaluating patient satisfaction scores, especially the "likelihood to recommend" a provider, which is used as a measure of the quality of surgery a patient receives.
Dr. Christopher P. Kruglik
Emory University
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: The Effect of Surgeon Vocal Pitch and Gender on Patient Satisfaction, Otolaryngology, October 2025, Wiley,
DOI: 10.1002/ohn.70059.
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Stanford Otolaryngology-Head & Neck Surgery's Winter 2025 Newsletter
Released by Stanford in this newsletter regarding this manuscript: "Finally, Brian Nuyen led a study co-authored by Noel Ayoub, Ann Kearney, Jennifer Alyono, and others that examined the effect of surgeons’ voice pitch and gender on patient perceptions of the surgeon. In a creative experiment, the team recruited cisgender female and cisgender male voice actors to perform a standardized informed consent for tracheostomy. The audio recordings were then up-pitch or down-pitch modulated to create “high voice” and “low voice” test recordings. Over 2,500 participants crowd-sourced through Qualtrics listened to the recordings and rated the test surgeons in various domains. The study found that test surgeons with a lower modulated pitch were perceived as more experienced, regardless of gender. On the other hand, female surgeons' voices were rated as friendlier and showing more concern than male surgeons. Despite these pitch- and gender-based perceptions, the Press-Ganey “likelihood to recommend” score was comparable across groups. While this study reaffirmed some social attribute stereotypes based on vocal gender and pitch, namely that female voices were perceived as more compassionate, it was reassuring that the patient satisfaction score was independent of these biases. This finding has important implication in today’s healthcare environment, where patient satisfaction ratings play an increasing role in how physicians and hospitals are reimbursed."
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