When Love Meets Medicine: Why Families Seek Healing Outside Their Own Homes?
A Prelude: The Paradox of the Physician Within the Family
Across cultures, across centuries, and across continents, there is an ancient and quietly persistent paradox, i.e. when illness strikes, families are often surrounded by the comfort of loved ones, and yet when medical advice is needed, they step outside the home.
Even when a family includes a distinguished physician, a specialist with decades of experience, or a doctor whose hands have healed countless strangers, those closest to them frequently prefer to consult someone else. They pay for the privilege, willingly stand in line, and patiently wait for an appointment with a doctor they do not know nearly as intimately as their own relative.
Why is this so? Why do proximity, affection, and trust, namely, qualities that enrich personal life, become obstacles in professional medical encounters? The answers lie in the delicate boundaries between love and objectivity, between lived history and clinical distance, and between the visible and invisible forces that shape human relationships.
Let me share with readers some of the reasons I believe .
1. The Room Where Two Roles Cannot Coexist
Every physician lives two lives:
one as a professional trained to examine bodies and minds with disciplined objectivity, and another as a brother, sister, parent, spouse, child, or friend.
These two roles coexist harmoniously in daily life, until sickness enters the picture. Then the boundary between them becomes porous, unstable, and emotionally charged.
When a loved one becomes a patient, the doctor is no longer standing on level ground. They are standing on emotional fault lines.
The body they examine is a body they have embraced, known, cared for, or grown up with. The voice describing symptoms is a voice familiar from birthdays, childhood,
arguments, reconciliation, and shared history. The hands they may need to treat are hands they have held across the years.
Clinical detachment becomes difficult, if not impossible. Thus, the consulting room becomes the one place where a family member and a doctor cannot safely merge into the same person.
2. Why objectivity dies in the presence of affection? Objectivity is the physician’s compass. Its needle must not tremble. Yet in family care, the needle trembles constantly.
A doctor may over-treat a minor complaint out of fear What if I miss something?"
Or undertreat a serious condition out of denial, It cannot be something dangerous; I cannot bear the thought of it. Patients sense this too. They know that the physician’s emotions may cloud their judgment. And so they may doubt, question, or mistrust advice, not because the doctor is incompetent, but because the doctor cares too much. Strangers accept a doctor’s word. Family members scrutinize it, interpret it, or sometimes reject it, filtered through the lens of family history.
3. The Fortress of Privacy and the Weight of Secrets. Modern medicine to me, thrives on truth, sometimes painful truth, often deeply personal truth. But family members rarely want to expose the most fragile parts of themselves to one another. It is not easy to confess fears of cancer or disability, sexual difficulties, depression, or suicidal thoughts; addiction, alcoholism, or drug dependence, marital problems, financial stress, shame, guilt, or regret.
A relative-doctor, no matter how trustworthy, is still part of the family constellation. Shared information does not vanish into the silent vault of a clinic. Patients fear that it may subtly shift the relationship, alter perceptions, or resurface during conflicts.
I have come across cases where a family member consulted another family member who is a medical specialist, someone whom I personally know. Initially, it was not even a formal professional consultation, it was just an informal question between two family members. That question finally landed up with quarrels and criticisms, involving other family members as well, all because they are of the same family.
Thus, an external physician becomes a confessor, a safe, sealed space where vulnerability can be expressed without repercussion.
4. Confidentiality: The Sacred Wall That Families Cannot Build. Professional confidentiality is absolute. Family confidentiality is fragile, not because family members are careless, but because relationships are complex, layered, and emotionally charged. Even silence carries meaning. Even a change in expression can reveal an unintended truth.
A doctor-relative may keep secrets faithfully, but the patient still feels exposed simply because the doctor is part of their personal world. This perceived vulnerability is enough to push them outward to a neutral professional.
5. The Subtle Tyranny of Family Dynamics
Every family has its hidden architecture, a pattern of authority, pride, rivalry, unspoken expectations, and lifelong roles. The eldest child may find it hard to receive advice from the youngest, and I shall give a personal example shortly. A parent may reject guidance given by a child. A sibling may feel insulted when corrected by another. Old grievances may be activated by simple medical suggestions. These dynamics do not vanish in the consulting room; they intensify. Patients want to be seen as patients, not as “the irresponsible son,” “the stubborn sister,” or “the parent who never listens.” A doctor-relative cannot escape these familiar identities. A stranger-doctor, however, enters without history and without emotional baggage, and thus becomes easier to trust.
6. Ethical Constraints: When Medicine Restricts the Heart. What I have read in the past 30 years, is that medical associations around the world advise doctors not to treat their own family members except in emergencies. This is not a prohibition of love, but a safeguard for clinical excellence and legal clarity. Laws governing prescriptions, documentation, consent, and continuity of care are difficult to uphold in informal family consultations.
The physician who treats a relative risks becoming both doctor and defendant if outcomes turn unfavourable. A misdiagnosis can fracture not only a reputation but an entire family bond.
Thus, many doctors decline such requests out of deep concern, not indifference.
7. The Fear of Blame and the Burden of Guilt
When a doctor treats a patient in the hospital, a poor outcome is a clinical tragedy.
When a doctor treats a family member, a poor outcome is a personal catastrophe.
The stakes are far higher; the emotional cost is far heavier. Physicians quietly fear being blamed being misunderstood being accused of not caring enough living with guilt if harm occurs
Many patients instinctively spare their relatives this emotional weight by seeking help elsewhere.
8. The Desire to Buy Boundaries
Perhaps the most profound reason is this:
Paying an external doctor “purchases” a boundary that cannot be acquired within a family.
The consulting room becomes sacred space, free from emotional ties remembered quarrels, sibling rivalries, parental authority, marital tension, childhood memories. The patient becomes simply “a patient,” and the doctor becomes simply “a doctor.” This purity of roles is impossible to achieve at home.
9.
My own late eldest sister in Singapore illustrated and revealed this beautifully. Despite my late eldest sister having a daughter who is a clinical professor and a senior consultant in respiratory and critical medicine in Singapore General Hospital where she is surrounded by her teams of other medical specialists, my sister will not consult her own daughter. But my sister stays in the same house as her specialist daughter. But she would not consult her own daughter s in the same house because my sister told me her daughter always criticize her about her weight. So she rather phone me all the way in Kuala Lumpur to seek my advice.
We also have a brother who was a consultant cardio-thoracic surgeon, and nephews who are also medical or surgical specialists, all residing in Singapore where it is much, much nearer her place. But my sister still preferred to phone me all the way from Singapore to Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia, 350 km away for her health problem even well late into the night.
Why? Because I am here, a safe distance from her who would not criticize here. I am her neutral island. I am the loved one who advised without entanglement, without criticism, without the friction of daily closeness.
She trusted me not because I am a more knowledge on health and medical matters who could advise her better, but because I am one who occupied a peaceful place in her life. That is the heart of this entire chapter.
10. The final truth I strongly believe is to protect family relationship. People do not avoid consulting doctor-relatives because they lack faith in them. They avoid it because they value the relationship too much. Health problems come and go. Family is meant to endure. Most patients instinctively understand that shifting a family relationship into a clinical one risks damaging the delicate fabric that holds families together. And so, they choose the safer path to cherish the doctor-relative as family and the external doctor as a professional. In that choice, there is wisdom. I am sure most doctors and their family members will agree with me.
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