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
And it can provide a kind of coherence to their experience that sometimes has felt very unsettling or chaotic.
Yes, yes, definitely.
So in 2015, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine set out to do a really comprehensive report to sort of try to wrap their arms around diagnostic error and do their best attempt to estimate how
how great an issue this was and try to understand it better.
And basically, that report concluded that most people will experience a diagnostic error in their lifetime, sometimes with devastating consequences, whether that's disability or even death.
Some conservative estimates suggest that 5% of American adults experience a diagnostic error every year.
So that's something like
10 to 13 million americans that is something that many people call a very conservative estimate so you're talking about tens of millions of people among that group of diagnostic error typically researchers look at diagnostic error in three buckets more or less there's a wrong diagnosis so the answer is incorrect you had heart failure but you were diagnosed with chronic bronchitis
There's delayed diagnosis.
So a diagnosis took longer than it should have.
So perhaps a delayed diagnosis of cancer.
And then there's missed diagnosis, which is someone is never diagnosed.
They go on living undiagnosed.
And so altogether, those are sort of the three buckets that we tend to look at when it comes to diagnostic error.
This one is a little bit complicated because medicine is inherently uncertain and no one expects that something very rare, like a very rare cancer would be diagnosed immediately.
Right.
But what they sort of have determined is like, let's say a person comes in and you look back on their medical history and they were complaining about this cyst in their neck for years and years and years, and there was never any follow-up.
And then you find out it's cancer and it's stage four.
And that is sort of what would be determined as a delayed diagnosis.
It was something that generally medicine agrees could have been diagnosed earlier.
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