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.
Trend
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
Yes, it is interesting.
As you mentioned, the diagnosis isn't necessarily fixed.
Definitions of disease change, new conditions are discovered, scientific knowledge progresses, and we understand new things about the human body.
There's new biomarkers that can be taken into consideration.
I think it can complicate the crisis a bit in that
perhaps decades, a hundred years ago, whatever you had, you would have had a diagnosis for it.
It would have been like,
melancholia or you know it just would have been something that was sort of yeah yes this like grab bag of things and now because we science requires more precision sometimes when things don't fit exactly into these categories I think it can create a lot of uncertainty specifically I think
There's sort of this category of patients who have what's sometimes called medically unexplained illnesses.
So they have a lot of symptoms like fatigue, brain fog, headaches, but perhaps not a lot of signs.
Like there's no rash, there's no fever, there's nothing that's coming up on a diagnostic test.
And, you know, perhaps in the past, again, maybe it wouldn't have been a great diagnosis, but like you might've been put into some kind of category.
Again, that's probably, you know, not for the best, but today that remains very difficult and complicated.
And sometimes you don't know, am I experiencing something totally unknown that nobody's ever going to
figure out?
Or am I sort of at the edge of modern medical knowledge?
And maybe in 10 years, there will be sort of an understanding of what I have.
So there's some uncertainty there for sure.
That's hard to grapple with.
People who have rare or like a novel disease experience very long diagnostic journeys often.
Showing 141–160 of 650 · page 8 of 33
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