Direct-to-consumer advertising and the patient-physician relationship

The findings suggest that response to DTCA may be significantly related to patients' evaluation of communication quality and their satisfaction with the physician. However, these findings may not generalize to all medical conditions or types of patient. Furthermore, DTCA response does not appear to be related to other patient-physician relationship outcome variables. Given these findings, key variables to explore in future DTCA research with respect to its effect on the patient-physician relationship include patient expectations and disease/condition type.