Advertisement-Induced Prescription Drug Requests Patients' Anticipated Reactions to a Physician Who Refuses

Journal of Family Practice, June, 1999 by Robert A. Bell, Michael S. Wilkes, Richard L. Kravitz

THE PHYSICIAN-PATIENT RELATIONSHIP

Because few individuals gave "very likely" responses on any of these outcome measures, we aggregated the "somewhat likely" and "very likely" groups in all subsequent analyses. Table 1 shows the associations between the various predictor variables and the 4 assessed reactions to physician refusal. Excluded from this table are the variables age, education, sex, and race, which were not associated significantly with any of the 4 outcome measures. Our first hypothesis was that patients would be more likely to react negatively in clinical relationships characterized by poor physician communication. In line with this prediction, respondents were more likely to report the potential for disappointment, persuasion, prescription shopping, and physician switching when they evaluated their physician's communication skills as poor.