Why Good Friends Don’t Always Make Good Doctors: “The potentially distorted judgment of a physician caring for a loved one is well-worked territory. The traditional argument is that doctors may underestimate the severity of illnesses because they are unable to accept grim information about loved ones. Hippocrates, in fact, cautions against treating one’s own family.

My mistake, however, arose from a different, and much more modern circumstance. Medicine in the 21st century is a contact sport. It hurts. We have developed an assaultive, physical, even brutal approach to diagnosing illnesses and treating people: chemotherapy, surgery, biopsies, transplants. All for the better, most would argue, but literally a painful way to proceed. Once it was the awful taste of syrupy medicine; now it is the pain of a spinal tap.

And this creates the following conundrum: Even when someone is quite ill, the doctor can’t worry about hurting the person or the person’s feelings. Sorry, but the next biopsy or the next surgery or the next awful test must be done. Trying to soften the blow in the name of friendship invites disaster. Stated another way, a better question to ask your doctor is: ‘What would you do if it were a total stranger?'” (New York Times )