This might be as much of a vent as it is an inquiry to how people may have handled similar situations. My family members — most specifically my mother and father — are constantly inserting me into their healthcare scenarios, but not in a way that I feel is okay.
My opioid-addicted father calls me 5 minutes after any healthcare professional leaves the room, most recently, IM and Surgery teams, to get a confirmation bias that "they aren't doing everything they can" (read as "they didn't give me dilaudid"). He has also called me to vent about the limitations of the number of Percocet his insurance company will let him have per month and to ask me "what should I tell my pain doc?" I don't have any intention of aiding his habits and have only ever tried to provide the idea that there are far better solutions but this is going on 20 years, almost as long as I can remember and I'm afraid "precontemplative" would still be a generous description. He has verbally stated, "I'd rather live pain-free and die from my liver/kidney/heart/lungs than do anything else."
My mother, on the other hand, is a pain–in-the-ass-by-proxy. She is a physicians worst nightmare as she has accompanied my step-father through his cancer diagnosis and subsequent surgery and his heart attack over the last 10 years. Everything is questionable with google at the ready. She has an astonishing, Dunning-Kruger-like level of confidence in her medical knowledge and is dismissive of anything other than what she thinks is best. She fires physicians regularly and my step-father long ago realized arguing with her is futile.
To make things worse, they mention me in these interactions. I happen to have good marks and am doing pretty well, which they use as ammunition in sort of a "let me check with my son, he's an honor medical student" way or a "well I think my opinion is valid, my son is a medical student" way… even typing that is cringeworthy. They put me on speaker and ask my opinion but only in the "He wants to do X but I think Y is more appropriate, don't you?"
There could be so much more I could get into, with other family members my mother has represented in healthcare scenarios, but you get the gist… I've attempted to avoid these scenarios but the not so subtly, but honest "please stop doing that" has so far been fairly ineffective.
Has anyone else had to deal with this? Especially from the provider side of things with difficult families or families with healthcare professionals in them? I really don't mind talking to them if they wanted to have a realistic conversation, but the situations I find myself in are uncomfortable and forced.
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