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
learn that exam and are sort of tested on their ability to glean a diagnosis from it.
So the United States has a very long tradition of young doctors following a more senior physician through rounds at the patient's bedside and sort of watching
that physician do an exam and then they might discuss it afterwards.
And they do have that sort of back and forth discussion.
However, what's different, something that is done in the UK in medical school is that young doctors are actually, they themselves are observed doing the physical exam.
by a more senior doctor, and then they are tested on it.
And that test is very crucially important to whether they get to become a physician in the first place.
So what ends up happening is a young doctor then goes through these periods where they're observed by someone and they're actually watching, did you do every step of the physical exam that you should have?
Is there anything that you missed, a question you didn't ask, or the way that you held that patient's foot, like you missed something?
Are you listening to the heart in the right way?
And they really have to train for that because they will undergo an exam in which those skills are basically rated, right?
And it's sort of almost like a pass fail.
And if you aren't able to get the correct diagnosis purely out of this physical exam, you don't continue on or you sort of, you have to go back and retake it.
So what some physicians at Johns Hopkins as well as Northwestern University now have done is they are trying to find a way to incorporate that kind of testing into their
medical school system to basically ensure that young physicians today can still do the physical exam and can still reach a diagnosis without necessarily needing all the tools they do have at their disposal.
And of course they should still use them.
Like ultrasounds are amazing and doctors should know how to use them.
But there is this effort to try to make sure that the sort of skills that come from a physical exam are not lost over time.
And what they do find is you can get very far in a diagnosis from the physical exam still today without necessarily needing to use the technology.
The more ideal balance would be
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