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 over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 1.

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This Podcast Will Kill You · Special Episode: Alexandra Sifferlin & The Elusive Body · 2 Jun 2026 podcast
So there's some things that don't require very many tools at all and just rely on a physician's medical knowledge and experience seeing so many patient cases over time.
And then some things that will require more investigation and deeper testing and more tools.
Yes.
So I'm glad you liked that part of the book.
It was most interesting to me because I got to do a lot of looking back at history, but
You know, the physical exam is so important because it is this beginning, as you said, the beginning of the diagnosis.
And it really just starts with observation, which is sort of one of the oldest ways to do medicine.
If you look back at sort of ancient medicine,
physicians were really just relying on their own senses.
What does the patient look like?
What am I hearing when they're coughing?
And sort of making some assumptions there.
And what's kind of amazing is that that is still where it begins.
You know, you still enter a doctor's office and you share symptoms and your doctor is observing you sometimes without any tools, often with like a stethoscope or something like that.
But it's kind of amazing that this process of just seeing.
Seeing the person in front of you and really listening to them, both listening to the sounds of their body, but also just listening to what they're telling you are so crucial.
And even as you say, today we have so many different tools for diagnosing, but you still need to have that period of just observation and physical exam to even decide whether
what tools make sense to bring in at this point at all and to be able to have that clinical judgment of basically what to do next.
You know, physicians everywhere learn a physical exam.
But what's interesting is the way that young doctors learn.
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