Welcome back to At the Bedside.

In today's episode, we're hoping to explore a set of scenarios nearly every clinician

and many health care trainees have experienced.

We want to talk about the challenges that come up when friends and family ask for medical care or even just medical advice.

I'm Tamar, I'm Margot, and this is Joffer.

We're lucky to have with us today Dr. Eric Fromm, a palliative care physician at the Dana

Farberg Cancer Institute. He's also faculty at the Serious Care Illness Program at Ariadne

Labs at Brigham Women's Hospital and Harvard, T.H. Chen School of Public Health.

Dr. Ferm's research and publications on this helped us think about real approaches to these scenarios.

And we asked him how he became interested in the topic.

This was at the Society of General Medicine.

I was talking with some colleagues about our experiences,

as family members getting health care.

We all found that we'd had experiences like this and we thought, you know, there's really not any good guidance around this. So we decided to kind of put our heads together and combine our experiences and you know my experience was very

negative I felt like I really failed my wife.

Dr. Fromm was especially gracious in allowing us to share his personal experience discussed in a 2008 paper in annals of internal medicine.

He writes of a particularly difficult and tiring day attending on the medicine wards when he received a call from his pregnant wife saying she was spotting.

They both thought this was another miscarriage.

When she had abdominal pain that night, he examined her and told her it was probably

cramping, though she said the pain was different. She went to see an obstetrician the next

morning and was diagnosed with a tubal pregnancy requiring surgery.

I couldn't, I sort of couldn't really get myself to, gosh I was a doctor who was impaired and didn't know it and made some bad decisions

...