Johanna Shapiro, Laura Mosqueda and Danny Botros
For the first time in history, people who have an early or mid-life onset disability are living into old age. Their attitudes toward health care and the physician–patient relationship are shaped by many factors: the era in which they acquired the disability, their age at onset and their current age, to mention only a few. However, even though this population is growing at an exponential rate,1 and even though they require more health care than their non-disabled counterparts,2 there is virtually no information available regarding these patients’ attitudes toward and relationship with their primary care and family physicians. Yet, as the life span of individuals with disabilities normalizes, so that people with disabilities are living longer, it becomes of increasing interest to discover how this population relates to its primary care physician caregivers as it ages.