NEW YORK (Wall Street Journal) — I’ve seen a number of doctors for various medical complaints over the years. But the medical expert who knew me best was my mother.My mother never went to medical school, but like most moms she managed the health care in our home — making the doctor appointments, getting prescriptions filled and making sure we took our pills.

My mom had four kids and a husband to keep track of, but she was uniquely tuned in to all of us.

One morning when my brother was 16, he was headed out the door for a driver’s ed class. My mom stopped him because she thought he looked pale. My brother insisted that he felt fine, but my mom held her ground and my brother stayed home. A few hours later he had been diagnosed with acute appendicitis and was headed for emergency surgery.

“A mother knows her kids,” she often told me.

Mothers are the unsung heroes of the health-care system. In a survey of families, the Kaiser Family Foundation reported in 2003 that 80 percent of mothers assume the major role in choosing the family doctor and taking children to appointments. Doctors say that wives often make their husbands’ appointments as well, and accompany them on the visit.

The reasons mothers shoulder so much of the health-care burden are complex. Women tend to manage the household, child care and mealtime, so it makes sense they would also manage family health.

And women are bigger users of health care than men and are far more likely to have a personal physician themselves. Clearly fathers make important contributions to their families, but in most families, women shoulder the larger share of parenting duties.

Whether a mother has an instinctive advantage when it comes to the health of her kids is a matter of debate. One study suggests that motherhood may permanently alter the brain’s memory and learning centres, according to a November 1999 report in Nature.

In rat studies, rat mothers did a better job finding food and navigating mazes than rats who hadn’t given birth. The theory is that the hormones of pregnancy as well as the powerful sensory events of motherhood, such as childbirth and breast-feeding, may permanently alter the brain, equipping mothers with enhanced cognitive abilities that help them care for their young.

The brain benefits also showed up in “foster” rat moms who cared for litters but hadn’t given birth — suggesting that adoptive moms, and possibly fathers who are primary caregivers, also experience changes that help them raise children.

“Perhaps human mothers’ uncanny abilities to juggle and to problem-solve are not a coincidence,” notes Alan Greene, a Danville, California, paediatrician and founder of www.drgreene.com.

Harvard physician Jerome Groopman says one of his earliest experiences with mother’s instinct involved his own wife. The couple was travelling with their nine-month-old son, who was fussy and feverish. A local paediatrician reassured them it was just a virus and offered Tylenol. His wife wasn’t convinced, in part, because his diaper smelled slightly different than usual. She kept a close eye on her son, and a few hours later went back to the emergency room. He was suffering from an intestinal obstruction, and emergency surgery saved the child’s life.

In researching his book “How Doctor’s Think”, Dr. Groopman says he came across other tales of mothers’ instinct. One story involved a mother who spent months trying to convince her doctor that her six-year-old wasn’t suffering from tension headaches. She finally demanded a brain scan, and a tumour was diagnosed.

To be sure, there are countless stories where mothers were wrong. “But the really good paediatricians I’ve met, they take the mothers very seriously,” says Dr. Groopman.

It’s notable that after my own mother was diagnosed with a deadly cancer, she was still worrying about our health in her final days.

She made my dad promise to schedule a routine check-up and reminded me to have my eyesight checked.