You can also listen to this episode on Apple—or wherever you get your podcasts. You can also find it on YouTube.
Alexandra is a health and science journalist and an Opinion editor at The New York Times. Her first book, The Elusive Body: Patients, Doctors, and the Diagnosis Crisis, just recently came out, but she started the reporting for it back in 2018. It’s a fascinating read—full of interesting research and human stories—about how often patients are misdiagnosed, the large cost of this, and the people who are creatively working to improve our medical system. Which includes many talented doctors from within the system.
We talk about all of this today, including the amazing cast of characters at the Undiagnosed Diseases Network, which is run out of the NIH, and which could serve as a model for our larger healthcare system.
We talked about patient experiences, which I’m sure will resonate with many of you. We also talked about the role that technology and AI currently plays in a doctor’s diagnosis, and how this might change in the future. And we get a bit into the downsides of some of the newer early screening and detection trends.