Well, how comfortable would you feel if your mom/dad/sister/brother/daugther etc. performed a rectal on you?
Usually, you'll really want to be able to retain the professionalism required to appropriately treat your patients-for their sake and your own, however if you are a sane person (and wish to remain sane), it's only normal that there are personal and social boundaries that would naturally affect your practice when it comes to treating your own family, simply due to the nature of the patient/doctor relationship.
That is, while you yourself may
feel completely comfortable to take care of your loves ones when it comes to minor stuff, there's really no guarantee that more involved issues will be dealt with adequatley, nor that you even handle the minor stuff with any sort of bias.
So, normally you really wouldn't want to be your family's PCP-Several good examples and reasons were already mentioned, think about the type of relationship you have with your loved ones, and think about how comfortable you would feel discussing all sorts of personal medical stuff with any of them, and then try to imagine how they might feel, talking to you about such things.
While you may in fact not mind this all that much-most people normally would-as I said, such boundaries are totally normal and in fact healthy, for your yourself as well as for your family.
In fact, once you start practicing you'll get to know patients who'll share personal secrets with you that not even their loved ones of half a lifetime may know about. Nonetheless this stuff may be medically relevant. And thus you might endanger the quality of your own loved ones' medical care exactly due to your personal relationship to them. Besides, you should take into consideration that personally taking care of your family's medical needs, might more than likely result in negatively affecting your personal relationship to them eventually.
In fact, even taking care of your family members in situations where this is really required (i.e. emergencies), may be totally weird (in the aftermath) or result in non-optimum care for other reasons.
So generally spoken, you would normally want to refer your family members to a specialist-even if the required care/theraphy/procedure should be absolutely within the scope of your own practice-for example, I've personally witnessed a seasoned G/S attending gross out when her 14 months old's head lac (minor) got sutured.
Likewise, consider the issues of possible malpractice: your objectivity would be totally lost in such situations-however when you aren't exclusively responsible for your family's medical care, but mainly rather function as some sort of personal "medical advisor", you could really enrich not only the medical care they receive, but also the relationship to them.
So, whenever possible you should at most want to observe the care your loved ones receive, and not provide it yourself for the aforementioned reasons. Regardless of your professional background and experience, you may however find yourself incapable of attending procedures performed on your loved ones nonetheless.
Apart from that, if you're still into being your own family's PCP regardless of (or possibly even due to?) all this, make sure not to tell your colleagues about that, otherwise they'll inevitably imagine you routinely performing pelvics on your mom or granny as a hobby...
HTH
