It's quite common for elderly patients' relatives to threaten me with all kinds of time consuming or reputation hurting bullshit like complaints involving a lot of paperwork or bad press in the local newspaper unless I wedge their relatively healthy granpa straight from the hospital past the line to a nursing home as fast as possible, instead of sending them back home where they'd do just fine. I haven't caved in and so far nothing bad has happened except some relatively harmless badmouthing. It's common for doctors to be blackmailed to do all kinds of stuff like unnecessary investigations or treatments.

You could say that in the US there have been enough trials and press gone badly for doctors that blackmailing often works. I'm glad that this isn't the case in Finland and we're still practicing cost effective medicine instead of covering our asses from all angles out of fear. The flip side of this is that incompetent doctors roam a bit too freely.

In a couple of cases I've made decisions that I've been blackmailed to make, not because of the blackmailing but because the blackmailer's interests happened to coincide with my medical reasoning. I find this problematic for signalling reasons.