Alexandra Sifferlin

And then in some ways, it's also hopeful that we've learned so much from this experience and hopefully...

we all can use that to sort of question the assumptions that we've held about diseases that are sort of hard to explain or sort of defy current medical knowledge and to hopefully keep a more open mind about those kinds of situations.

It really is.

And I really feel for people who find themselves in that situation.

And I think, you know, some advice that I've gotten in the reporting is

you know, asking every doctor that you're seeing, you know, like, what would you do in my situation?

What other things could this potentially be?

Is there promising research?

Or do you know someone who might know about promising research in this area?

It's unfortunate that people have to be their own advocates in some ways, because you really, you do, you want the medical system to kind of take care of you.

You want, you know, these answers.

But

There is a lot of incredible knowledge out there.

And I think, you know, just trying to find the right research or, you know, medical group that can help you is really key.

But I also hope that there can be more places like that that can hopefully come from this, more that medicine can recognize that there are people

fall into these buckets of, you know, what could sometimes be called medically unexplained or what have you.

And should that be taken much more seriously?

Should there be at every sort of hospital system or mainstream medical institution, should there be a group of clinicians who function similar to the undiagnosed diseases program at the NIH who really try to

to take on these kinds of cases and not sort of dump them off to the next person I really think something like that could be valuable

One of the interesting things when writing this book was at the beginning when I, you know, this was 2019, 2020, when I was doing some initial research and I would talk to many clinicians about artificial intelligence.