Fictive Kinshis

Humans are social beings; as a species we are coded to search for the companionship of other individuals, even when they are non-human. Interpersonal relationships make us feel safe, because it would gave us advantage over predators. Therefore, each person is born inside of a community that would care for them, and as a response, they would contribute to the community´s maintenance and development. Every person would create several bonds with other people throughout their lives. During the first years of life, those relationships would involve the closest family members, who will satisfy the child´s need for social interactions; also, such contacts would help the individual to improve the social skills that he or she would need later in his or her life. Most people develop a very strong connection with whom they get their first social exchanges, which normally are people that shared some degree of connection with the individual; such as, consanguine relationships, which mean that the individuals shared bonds of blood, or affinal relations that are referred to the connection created through marriage.

(1) However, many people also create relationships with other individuals with whom they do not share any kind of connection; those associations are called fictive kinships. To explain, a fictive kinship refer to individuals that form strong relations with people who are not their relatives, sometimes those associations being more powerful that the relations with their actual relatives. Such relationships are called fictive as in fiction; in other words, as something that do not really exists, because there is no real connection between the two individuals. Moreover, fictive kinships are extremely common, and can be the most importan...

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...knowledge is transmitted to the new generations. Therefore, the care that patients would receive could be summarized in the teachings that the doctor who treat them received.

In summary, the common fictive relationships that are created, particularly in the biomedical community, served to different purposes. Maybe the most important one would include the correct learning of the medical profession that ensures the correct treatment of patients in the future. However, it also helps with new discoveries and researches and even as emotional support to the practitioners themselves, because it let them share their passion with individuals that feel it as well, and with whom they can have an intellectual exchange. Therefore, it would permit them obtain new ideas and knowledge that would help them become better and wiser, ending with the improvement of the patients care.