Alexandra Sifferlin
speaker
650 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard May 2026
last heard 2 Jun
Alexandra Sifferlin’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 1.
Appearances
This Podcast Will Kill You · Special Episode: Alexandra Sifferlin & The Elusive Body · 2 Jun 2026
podcast
I got interested in diagnosis for both professional and personal reasons.
I was a health journalist at Time Magazine, and I was discovering that one of the things that readers were emailing me about most often were issues related to their own unresolved diagnostic journey.
So I would hear from people all the time basically asking me,
you are interviewing a lot of physicians.
Do you have any ideas of someone who could help me?
I have been undiagnosed for this long.
And it happened frequently enough that it felt like it was something worth looking into.
I was just curious, what is it that causes someone to spend such a long period of time undiagnosed?
And then personally, my book is dedicated to my sister, Francesca, who has experienced a variety of undiagnosed conditions over the years.
And so I have been able to see firsthand how frustrating and destabilizing it can be to be suffering from something for which you have no solid answers.
And so I just became very invested in both the scientific questions and also the personal anguish and how to resolve these things.
So at its most basic level, a diagnosis is basically an answer to what ails us.
It's the identification of a disease or condition that explains the symptoms that a patient is experiencing.
But a diagnosis goes so much more beyond that because a diagnosis is also really the beginning, ideally, of a resolution.
So with a diagnosis, a physician can then build a treatment plan that will hopefully provide relief for their patient.
A diagnosis is crucial for getting insurance coverage for said treatment plan or any follow-up appointments, etc.,
A diagnosis is important if, let's say, you have something rare and you want to be in an experimental clinical trial.
You need a diagnosis for that.
A diagnosis can also create access to a community if there's other people who are suffering from the same condition.
And then I also think diagnosis can provide reassurance to people that they are experiencing something that is real.
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