{"id":8401,"date":"2017-06-18T17:04:44","date_gmt":"2017-06-18T21:04:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.nejm.org\/hiv-id-observations\/?p=8401"},"modified":"2019-06-14T07:38:21","modified_gmt":"2019-06-14T11:38:21","slug":"fathers-day-rumination-families-lots-doctors","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.nejm.org\/hiv-id-observations\/index.php\/fathers-day-rumination-families-lots-doctors\/2017\/06\/18\/","title":{"rendered":"On Father’s Day, A Rumination on Families with Lots of Doctors"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>My father is a doctor.<\/p>\n

So was my father’s father. And my father’s uncle. And my father’s cousin.<\/p>\n

But that’s not all. My father’s brother was also a doctor — he loved<\/em> being a doctor more than anyone on the planet, and attended neurology meetings long after he retired, right up until the time he died last year.<\/p>\n

My father’s brother-in-law (i.e., his sister’s husband) — you guessed it, a doctor.<\/p>\n

It gets even more ridiculous. I have two first cousins who are<\/em> doctors,\u00a0and three\u00a0first cousins married<\/em> to doctors.<\/p>\n

And I, of course, am married to a doctor myself. Her brother? A doctor.<\/p>\n

Having all of these MDs readily available has had quite an influence on family dynamics. At one of our gatherings, my brother — not a doctor, he’s in finance — told an elderly aunt the name of the bank\u00a0he was working for at the time.<\/p>\n

Hard of hearing, she responded, “What medical school?”<\/p>\n

These gatherings, not surprisingly, can sometimes seem more like medical grand rounds than holiday celebrations. You almost expect someone at Thanksgiving Dinner to say, “May I have the first slide, please?”<\/p>\n

The medical profession runs so strongly in my family that at times I suspect our various dogs are, in their own doggie world, the dog-equivalent of doctors. A bit nerdy, scholarly, caring for others.<\/p>\n

So why is it that some families take to medicine so avidly? It certainly isn’t a universal phenomenon — I routinely ask residency and fellowship applicants if there are doctors in their family, and most of them say no.<\/p>\n

You can try researching this question, but it’s a tricky thing to\u00a0search. (I tried.<\/a>)<\/p>\n

Let’s keep it simple, and list the reasons why people become doctors to begin with:<\/p>\n