Should not physicians' families be allowed the comfort of paying for medical care?

THE TRADITION that doctors give care to each other and to each other's families without charge is an ancient and honorable one. It demonstrates in action some of the noble aspirations of man—generosity, loyalty to his profession, pride in service, devotion to an ideal. Every physician is touched when a colleague turns to him for care. Even the doctors' doctor, who is already carrying an excessive share of such service, feels honored by each new request, for it is a tribute from a particularly discriminating patient. But this is only one side of the relationship—the donor's. I am convinced that in a majority of medical situations (particularly those in the areas of pediatrics and internal medicine) the recipient physician's family is receiving insufficient care, not through any fault of the donor but because the recipient is so inhibited in asking for it. It is hard to say whether the recipient physician or his wife is in the more uncomfortable spot. The physician, when he or a member of his family develops a symptom, particularly a minor one, is promptly involved in a conflict of feelings. He cannot, unless he is a most unusual person, detach himself emotionally while he takes a history and does a physical examination. His natural anxiety tends to make him vacillate between exaggerating and minimizing the significance of the symptom. From the start he is debating in his mind whether it would be appropriate to call the proper physician. Consciously or unconsciously he is wondering how that colleague would view the request for help.