Patient/Professional Interaction and Its Relationship to Patients' Psychological Distress and Frequent Use of Health Services

Abstract

A number of factors affect a person's visit to any health professional or service. At one extreme, use of health services is determined by illness but as Zola (1966) pointed out, there is a "vast bulk of illness as such, defined subjectively and clinically, which is not brought to the attention of the health professional by patients." Antonovsky (1962) argued that the "vast bulk of what is brought to physicians by patients and thus, their use of health services is concerned with quite minor physical disorders."A large proportion of sociological research on health service utilization has dealt with the organization of health professions (Anderson, 1973; Friedson, 1970) and with access to and distribution of medical care (Mechanic, 1975). Another great mass of utilization studies has dealt with individual client perceptions, psychological traits, satisfactions, stress and health (Eichhorn, 1972; DeMiguel, 1974).