Alexandra Sifferlin

put my feelings aside.

I just know I need to get them some help.

And here I'm going to look up, you know, who's the best person to send them to.

Or is it even that this person is experiencing something that could be sort of at the edges of current medical knowledge and there's nobody who might know what's going on, but perhaps they're

you know, we can still, you know, work together, we could there, there could be a kind of system in place where an undiagnosed diseases network isn't just for people with like, the rare, rare, rare conditions, but maybe there is a kind of place that you could send someone with something more medically unexplained, and then they could have a sort of positive, more holistic approach.

But I think finding ways to kind of embrace the uncertainty and still feel like it's productive, I think that's important for physicians, too.

That's what was one of the most fascinating parts of this book process, because when I started writing, it was pre-COVID.

So, you know, long COVID sort of emerged during the book reporting.

And, you know, there had been this understanding, but I think it was a little bit siloed, that viruses can cause sort of long-term, very, like a cascade of health issues, you

But that wasn't necessarily something that the public knew.

It wasn't necessarily something that everyone across medicine had an understanding for.

And with time, I think the sort of effect, the potential post-viral illness has become much more understood.

I do think, and when I talk to many physicians, I think people learned a lot from the COVID experience and learned a lot from long COVID in ways that I think will hopefully be helpful in just understanding that

They're understanding that, you know, there are people who are existing at the edges of medical knowledge.

You know, for another example of this, in the last few years, researchers at Harvard basically confirmed that a very common virus, Epstein-Barr virus, causes MS.

And that was just yet another example of, oh, viruses can cause this cascade of health effects that we didn't fully understand.

And you can go back and think about patients maybe you saw in the past that were talking about falling ill and that they've never fully recovered.

And before that...

You might not really have had much to offer them, but now there is this sort of understanding that you can have health complications from viruses that last for quite a long time.

And so in some ways, it's sad because you think about all these groups of patients who this had been the case for for so long.