Why Can’t Anyone Tell Me What’s Wrong? | Alexandra Sifferlin
5/28/202658 min
Ever have something clearly wrong, and yet no expert can tell you what’s causing it? Or, worse, they DO tell you, but they’re wrong?
Nearly everyone will experience at least one diagnostic error in their lifetime. Not a minor mix-up, but a missed, delayed, or wrong diagnosis that shapes how long you suffer, what treatment you receive, and whether anyone believes something is actually wrong with you. For people in midlife, when the body starts sending new signals and the stakes of getting it right feel higher, that statistic carries a particular weight.
Alexandra Sifferlin is a science and health journalist and the author of The Elusive Body: Patients, Doctors, and the Diagnosis Crisis. She spent years inside hospital systems, talking with leading diagnosticians, tracing families who waited decades for answers, and mapping the structural gaps that let real suffering fall through. Her book is dedicated to her sister, who spent years being told her severe hip pain was a pillow-placement problem, until imaging revealed torn cartilage that required surgery.
In this conversation, you will explore:
- Why receiving a diagnosis is more than a medical event, and how a diagnosis gives you permission to be ill (in the best of ways)
- How physicians actually build a diagnosis in real time, and what gets lost when appointments shrink to seven minutes
- The case of the Proctor family, five siblings from rural Kentucky who spent decades with a mysterious, painful condition before becoming the first diagnosed case of the NIH's Undiagnosed Diseases Program
- Why the best diagnosticians in the country share one habit that has nothing to do with medical genius
- How AI note-taking in the exam room is making some appointments more human, not less
- What to do when you've seen four practitioners and nobody can tell you what's wrong
If you've ever walked out of a doctor's office with more questions than you arrived with, this conversation is for it.
You can find Alexandra at: Website | Instagram | Episode Transcript
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Clips
Transcript preview
First 90 secondsAlexandra Sifferlin· Guest0:00
I am not saying that physicians are bad at diagnosing. They get it right- Yeah ... 90% of the time. However, if you have one billion doctor's office visits a year, 155 million visits to the emergency room a year, you can quickly see how even a low rate of error can still affect a large number of people.
Jonathan Fields· Host0:19
So that 10% adds up to millions of people every year living with a missed, a delayed, or a wrong diagnosis. Maybe you're even one of them. Maybe someone you know or you love is one of them. Well, my guest, Alexandra Sifferlin, spent years inside this problem, talking to the country's best diagnosticians, tracing families who waited decades sometimes for answers, and mapping exactly where the system is breaking down and what to do about it. Her book, The Elusive Body: Patients, Doctors, and the Diagnosis Crisis, is the most clear-eyed account that I've read of what's actually happening when medicine can't tell you what's wrong, and what you can do about it. [upbeat music] I'm Jonathan Fields, and this is Good Life Project. And I wanna start with a phrase that stopped me cold. We'll jump right into that after this short break.
Paige DeSorbo1:08
[upbeat music] Hey, it's Paige DeSorbo from Giggly Squad. Okay, wait, have you ever had one of those moments where you're like, "I should be doing something fun tonight," and then you just don't because you don't have what you need? Because same. But recently I've been trying to be more of a yes person, and honestly, Amazon Prime