| In 1997, the Food and Drug Administration reversed its previous policy and started to allow pharmaceutical companies to advertise prescription drugs directly to the public. There are a myriad of economic, political, and social implications that are directly tied to pharmaceutical direct-to-consumer advertising (DTCA). One aspect of DTCA that is of critical importance to understand is how DTCA affects interactions between physicians and patients. The first study in this dissertation explores physicians' attitudes toward DTCA. The results indicate that the type of interaction that a physician uses with patients is a significant predictor of physicians' general attitudes toward DTCA. Controlling for demographics and characteristics of a physician's practice, doctors who employ a consumer model of interaction look more favorably on DTCA than doctors who use a shared decision-making model. Unexpectedly, physician's race/ethnicity also emerged as a significant predictor of attitudes toward many different aspects of DTCA.; The second study examines possible predictors of whether physicians perceive a patient's mention of DTCA as a threat to authority. Neither physician nor patient characteristics are significant determinants of whether the physicians perceive the mention of DTCA during a visit as a threat to their authority or as the patient making inappropriate requests. The strongest predictor of perceived threat to authority was when a patient made an inappropriate request. Just as race/ethnicity was a significant predictor of general attitudes toward DTCA in the first study, race/ethnicity was also a significant predictor of perceived threat to authority when the patient mentioned a specific DTCA.; The final study in this dissertation explores the factors that determine patients' satisfaction with their visits to physicians when they mention DTCA during the encounter. The results suggest that DTCA poses a threat to physician authority. Instead of accepting a doctor's recommendations and complying without question, patients are now unhappy with their physicians' decisions when these decisions do not adhere to their expectations, which are formed by DTCA. |
