Depending upon your political views and your lifestyle choices, the most important fact you may want to know about your primary care physician isn’t where your doctor went to school, but what political party they belong to.

That’s what a study by Yale University suggests. Researchers there wanted to know if a physician’s political beliefs might have an effect on the medical care or advice they hand out to patients.

According to the Fresno Bee, researchers created two groups of physicians: One composed of registered Democrats, the other of registered Republicans. They were then asked questions about their advice to patients on matters that could be considered politically charged.

On such non-political issues as alcohol abuse, riding a motorcycle without a helmet, and treating depression, both groups laid out pretty much the same course of action. But when the questions turned to politically tinged matters, the results were quite different.

Among the distinctions:

When asked what they would say to a woman who’d had prior abortions, but wasn’t currently pregnant, GOP doctors “were twice as likely as their Democratic counterparts to say they'd discourage any future abortions and 35 percent more likely to discuss so-called mental health aspects of abortion,” study co-author Eitan Hersh, a Yale political science professor, told the Bee.

When asked what advice they would offer to a male recreational marijuana user, Republican physicians were 64 percent more likely to lay out the risks of marijuana use than were Democrat-voting doctors. The GOP doctors were also 47 percent more likely to suggest cutting back on smoking marijuana.

When asked what advice they would give to patients concerning the existence of firearms in the home, Democrats were 66 percent more likely to tell patients not to store guns at home if they had small children living there. Republicans were far more likely to discuss the safe home storage of firearms than to suggest they not be stored at home, the survey says.

The study authors say their main takeaway is patients probably don’t know they’ll likely receive different feedback on certain medical issues depending on the politics of their physician. While it might seem awkward or intrusive to inquire about a doctor’s political leanings, doing so could lead to a better doctor-patient relationship.

"We don't leave things at the door," says Dr. Matthew Goldenberg, a Yale psychiatrist who co-authored the research. "Both patients and practitioners should be aware that there are these biases."

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Physician&rsquo;s political affiliation can influence medical advice

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Physician’s political affiliation can influence medical advice