Your father stopped taking his blood pressure medication eight months ago. He’s on three supplements a man at his church recommended, and he says he feels better than he has in years.
Now flip the chairs. You’re the one taking the supplements, and your brother has started forwarding you articles with the subject line “please read this.”
Those are the same situation seen from two seats, and almost nobody in either seat is being careless. They’re being somebody’s son, or somebody’s sister, or somebody who got frightened once and found something that helped.
What follows is about keeping a relationship intact across a real disagreement, what the research says about why the usual moves backfire, and the narrow set of situations where stepping in stops being optional.
Why an argument about a supplement is never about the supplement
Health choices sit close to identity. What you put in your body, who you trust with it, whose advice you take. So a comment about a supplement does not land as a comment about a supplement. It lands as a verdict on somebody’s judgment, which lands as a verdict on them.
Fear runs underneath it in both directions. The worried relative is scared of losing someone. The person making the choice is often answering a fear of their own: a doctor who didn’t listen, a diagnosis nobody explained, a parent who got worse on a prescription nobody questioned.
It also helps to know that your family member is not unusual. The National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health reports that in a 2012 national survey, more than 30% of US adults and about 12% of children had used a health approach outside conventional care in the past year.
NCCIH also draws the distinction that decides how worried you should be. Complementary means something used together with conventional medicine. Alternative means something used in place of it. NCCIH notes that true alternative use is rare, and that most people who use non-mainstream approaches also use conventional health care.
Families often argue as though every choice is the second kind. Usually it’s the first. Fish oil alongside a statin is a completely different conversation from fish oil instead of a statin, and knowing which one you’re having should change how hard you push.
The four arguments families have
An adult child worried about a parent. The difficulty here is structural: you are giving instructions to the person who taught you to tie your shoes, and every sentence carries that history.
A parent worried about an adult child. The hardest fact in this version is that it stopped being your decision on a specific birthday, and no amount of love converts it back.
Siblings disagreeing about a parent’s care. These are rarely only about care. The sibling doing the daily driving has information nobody else has. The sibling who flies in twice a year has distance and sees changes the daily caregiver has stopped noticing. Both are right, and both feel unheard.
Partners who approach health differently. Lowest stakes on any given Tuesday, highest stakes over thirty years, because this one gets decided and re-decided forever.
What doesn’t work, and why it hardens people
Most readers have already tried the obvious things. There’s research on why they fail.
Facts delivered as correction. A 2012 report in Psychological Science in the Public Interest, led by Stephan Lewandowsky, reviewed why false beliefs survive being corrected. Retractions often fail to update what people remember, efforts to retract misinformation can backfire and increase the original misbelief, and a person’s worldview is one of the biggest obstacles to changing their mind.
Corrections aren’t worthless. A 2021 study in the International Journal of Psychology by Dian van Huijstee and colleagues found that corrections did reduce the persuasive pull of false health information, though for negative information some of the influence stuck around afterward. So a correction is partial and slow. It does not work like deleting a file.
Volume. Saying it louder, or more often, or with more certainty, pushes against the other person’s sense that the choice is theirs. A 2020 study in Health Communication, led by Adam Richards, tested health messages that varied in how strongly they threatened a person’s freedom to choose. Messages that explicitly reminded people the decision belonged to them produced less resistance, and that effect was still measurable a week later.
Ultimatums. An ultimatum forces someone to choose between the behavior and you. You will not always win that. And if you do win it, you’ve won by threat, which means the next decision gets hidden from you rather than discussed.
Sending articles. Writing in the Canada Communicable Disease Report in 2020, physician Arnaud Gagneur noted that trying to convince hesitant parents by simply supplying the facts about vaccination can backfire and leave them more hesitant than before. A forwarded article carries a second message underneath the first one: someone smarter than you disagrees with you. That message is the one that gets received.
What helps
The approach with the strongest evidence behind it goes by an unglamorous name: motivational interviewing. It’s built on partnership rather than persuasion, drawing out the person’s own reasons for change, and treating their beliefs with respect rather than as errors to be fixed.
A randomized trial published in Eurosurveillance in 2023, led by Pierre Verger, tested it with 733 mothers in two maternity hospitals in southeastern France. Midwives trained in motivational interviewing talked with half of them; the other half got a vaccination leaflet. Hesitancy scores in the interview group fell by about 33%, and the effect was largest among the mothers who started out most hesitant. In the United States, a 2018 study in the Journal of Health Communication by Jenna Reno and colleagues trained providers and staff at eight pediatric and family medicine clinics in these techniques, and the providers reported better conversations with vaccine-hesitant parents afterward.
You are not a clinician and this is not a clinical visit. But the following moves come straight out of that approach, and they work at a kitchen table.
Ask what they’re hoping it will do. Not “why on earth are you taking that.” Try “what are you hoping it helps with?” The answer is almost always specific and concrete: sleep, joint pain, energy, brain fog, not ending up like their mother did. That answer tells you what the real problem is. And the real problem is something the two of you can work on together, which the supplement argument never was.
Find the goal you already share. Neither of you wants him in a hospital. Both of you want her at the wedding in June. Say the shared goal out loud before you say anything else, because it reframes the disagreement as two people on the same side arguing about method.
Say plainly that it’s their call. This is the move the reactance research supports, and it only works if you mean it. “This is your decision and I’m not trying to take it over” is not a rhetorical trick. It’s a true statement that removes the thing the other person is bracing against.
Offer what you know once, as your own worry, then stop. A 2015 study in Health Communication by Liz Gardner and Glenn Leshner tested messages with adults who had diabetes. Messages shaped as a story, and messages that pointed at the effect on family and friends rather than on the individual, produced less perceived threat to choice, less anger and less counterarguing than straight recommendations. In practice that means “I got scared when I read about this, and I’d rather tell you than sit on it” works better than “you need to read this.”
Then separate the relationship from the agreement, and say that out loud too. Something like: I’ve said my piece, I’m not going to keep raising it, and none of this changes anything between us.
A conversation you can have
Six things to say, in roughly this order. They’re short on purpose.
- “Can I ask what you’re hoping it does for you?”
- “What was going on that made you want to try it?”
- “How will you know if it’s working?” This one invites them to evaluate their own choice, which is the only kind of evaluation that ever changes anything.
- “Have you told your doctor you’re taking it? I’m only asking because of interactions with your other medicines.”
- “Here’s the one thing that worries me, and then I’ll leave it alone.” One worry. Specific. Keep the promise.
- “This is yours to decide. I’d rather know what you’re doing than be the person you hide it from.”
Then stop talking. Count to five before you fill the silence, because the silence is where they think.
What not to do with this list: run it as a script in one sitting. These are openings spread over months, not an intervention.
The ask that matters more than winning the argument
If you only get one thing, don’t make it agreement. Make it disclosure to their clinician.
NCCIH advises people to tell all of their health care providers about complementary approaches they use, and the reason is practical rather than ideological. Supplements and herbs interact with prescription drugs. A clinician who knows can check. A clinician who doesn’t know may read a new symptom as the disease getting worse.
Staying quiet is the norm, not the exception. A 2024 mixed-methods study in BMC Complementary Medicine and Therapies, led by Pauliina Aarva, surveyed 6,802 users of complementary therapies in Finland and reported that two in three say nothing to their physicians. The reasons the researchers identified are worth sitting with: people expected an unaccepting response, their physician never asked, and they believed it wasn’t necessary. That’s Finnish data, so treat it as evidence about reasons rather than a US percentage. In the United States, a 2019 study in JAMA Oncology by Nina Sanford and colleagues examined the same gap among American cancer patients and cancer survivors, a group with more to lose than most from an interaction nobody knew about.
Notice what that first reason implies. Many people stay silent because they expect to be judged. If your relative expects judgment from their doctor, they’re almost certainly expecting it from you. Being the family member who reacts calmly is not weakness. It’s the thing that keeps information flowing.
There’s a legal mechanism worth understanding here too. Under the federal health privacy rule, the Department of Health and Human Services says a provider may share information with a family member involved in someone’s care when the patient agrees, or when the patient simply doesn’t object. There’s a second route too. If the patient isn’t present, a provider can share when doing so looks like it serves the patient’s best interest. If your adult relative does not want their doctor talking to you, though, the doctor generally cannot simply brief you. That isn’t the office being obstructive. It’s the patient’s right, working as designed.
Where the line really is
An adult who can make decisions has the right to refuse care, including care you are certain they need. That is the system, not a loophole in the system. This site covers informed refusal and what it means in a separate article.
Disagreeing with a doctor is not evidence that someone has lost capacity. Capacity means being able to take in information, weigh it against your own values, and say what you have decided. It’s assessed by a clinician, for a specific decision, at a specific time. It is not declared by relatives in a group text, and “she’s making a terrible choice” is not the same statement as “she can’t make choices.”
Three situations are genuinely different, and in these you act.
A child who isn’t getting needed care. The federal Child Welfare Information Gateway, a service of the Children’s Bureau, describes neglect as a caregiver failing to provide essentials such as food, clothing, shelter or medical care. It also states that poverty does not equal neglect, which matters, because a family that can’t afford an appointment is in a different situation from a family refusing one.
If you’re not sure what you’re seeing, the Childhelp National Child Abuse Hotline at 1-800-422-4453 exists for exactly that uncertainty. You can also text GO to the same number, or use its chat. Understand the mechanism, because people get this wrong: Childhelp says it is not a reporting line and is not connected to 911. Its counselors help you think it through. The actual report goes to your state’s child abuse reporting line, and an emergency goes to 911.
An adult who can no longer decide. When someone genuinely cannot take in or weigh information, somebody has to act for them, and the orderly version is arranged in advance. MedlinePlus, published by the National Library of Medicine, describes a durable power of attorney for health care, which names a health care proxy to make medical decisions if the person cannot make or communicate them. The National Institute on Aging covers the same ground in its advance care planning material. Without that document, families often end up in a hospital conference room or a courtroom instead.
If you believe an older adult is being harmed, the Department of Justice’s Elder Justice Initiative tells people to report suspected abuse to Adult Protective Services. There is no national APS agency. These run at the state level, and DOJ links out to the association of state APS programs so you can find the right one. For situations that are not life-threatening, DOJ also lists the Eldercare Locator at 1-800-677-1116, and the National Elder Fraud Hotline at 1-833-372-8311 for financial fraud. For an emergency, its instruction is to call 911.
Immediate danger. Chest pain, signs of stroke, trouble breathing, a serious injury, or someone who stopped a medication and is now confused or barely responsive: that’s 911, and it’s 911 before it’s a phone call to a sibling. If someone is talking about suicide or you are frightened for their safety, the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline takes calls and texts at 988, free and confidential, around the clock, with chat at chat.988lifeline.org. You can contact 988 about someone else you’re worried about, not only about yourself.
What belongs on that list is a person who cannot protect themselves. What does not belong on it is an adult making a choice you’d never make. Treating the second as if it were the first costs you the relationship and changes nothing.
If you’re the one your family disagrees with
A fair number of people reading this are in the other seat, and the advice is shorter.
Your choices are yours, and you don’t owe anyone a debate across a holiday table. “I’m not discussing this, I love you, pass the potatoes” is a complete position, and repeating it calmly is more effective than defending yourself.
Tell your clinician what you’re taking anyway. Not because they get a vote, but because of interactions, and because a doctor working from an incomplete list can misread what your body is doing. If a clinician responds badly to that information, that’s useful information about the clinician. Feeling dismissed in a medical visit is a real problem with real options, and it has its own article here.
The one thing worth your own hard thinking: whether you’re using something alongside conventional care or instead of it. The first is common and usually low risk. The second is the choice that carries real consequences, and it deserves more scrutiny from you than from anyone else in your family.
What to hold onto
The measure of these conversations is not whether somebody changed their mind this week. It’s whether they’ll still tell you what they’re doing next year.
A relative who hides what they’re taking is in more danger than one who argues with you about it at dinner. The arguing one has a doctor who might find out, a family member who can spot a bad reaction, and someone to call at 2 a.m. The quiet one has none of that. So the practical goal of every one of these conversations is to stay the person they tell.
Put three numbers in your phone now, while nothing is wrong: your state’s child abuse reporting line, or Childhelp at 1-800-422-4453 if you need to talk it through first; the Eldercare Locator at 1-800-677-1116; and 988. The afternoon you need one of them is not the afternoon to go looking for it.
Sources
- National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health. “Complementary, Alternative, or Integrative Health: What's In a Name?.” nccih.nih.gov
- U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Office for Civil Rights. “Family Members and Friends (HIPAA for Individuals).” hhs.gov
- Child Welfare Information Gateway, Children's Bureau. “Child Abuse and Neglect.” childwelfare.gov
- Childhelp. “Childhelp National Child Abuse Hotline.” childhelphotline.org
- U.S. Department of Justice, Elder Justice Initiative. “Find Help or Report Abuse.” justice.gov
- MedlinePlus, National Library of Medicine. “Advance Directives.” medlineplus.gov
- National Institute on Aging. “Advance Care Planning.” nia.nih.gov
- Administration for Community Living. “Eldercare Locator.”
- 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline. “988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline.” 988lifeline.org
- Lewandowsky S et al.. “Misinformation and Its Correction: Continued Influence and Successful Debiasing. Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 2012. PubMed. DOI: 10.1177/1529100612451018.” doi.org
- van Huijstee D et al.. “Continued influence of misinformation in times of COVID-19. International Journal of Psychology, 2021. PubMed. DOI: 10.1002/ijop.12805.” doi.org
- Richards AS et al.. “Reducing Psychological Reactance to Health Promotion Messages: Comparing Preemptive and Postscript Mitigation Strategies. Health Communication, 2020. PubMed. DOI: 10.1080/10410236.2020.1839203.” doi.org
- Gagneur A. “Motivational interviewing: A powerful tool to address vaccine hesitancy. Canada Communicable Disease Report, 2020. PubMed. DOI: 10.14745/ccdr.v46i04a06.” doi.org
- Verger P et al.. “A postpartum intervention for vaccination promotion by midwives using motivational interviews reduces mothers' vaccine hesitancy, south-eastern France, 2021 to 2022: a randomised controlled trial. Eurosurveillance, 2023. PubMed. DOI: 10.2807/1560-7917.ES.2023.28.38.2200819.” doi.org
- Reno JE et al.. “Improving Provider Communication about HPV Vaccines for Vaccine-Hesitant Parents Through the Use of Motivational Interviewing. Journal of Health Communication, 2018. PubMed. DOI: 10.1080/10810730.2018.1442530.” doi.org
- Gardner L, Leshner G. “The Role of Narrative and Other-Referencing in Attenuating Psychological Reactance to Diabetes Self-Care Messages. Health Communication, 2015. PubMed. DOI: 10.1080/10410236.2014.993498.” doi.org
- Aarva P et al.. “Varieties of silence: a mixed-methods study exploring reasons and justifications for nondisclosure of the use of complementary therapies to physicians in Finland. BMC Complementary Medicine and Therapies, 2024. PubMed. DOI: 10.1186/s12906-024-04640-w.” doi.org
- Sanford NN et al.. “Prevalence and Nondisclosure of Complementary and Alternative Medicine Use in Patients With Cancer and Cancer Survivors in the United States. JAMA Oncology, 2019. PubMed. DOI: 10.1001/jamaoncol.2019.0349.” doi.org