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
And often when I speak to people with rare diseases, they'll talk either about years and years going without answers or
or going without correct answers.
Like they actually did have several diagnoses at different times, but none of them were quite right.
And maybe that was even explained to them.
Like this feels like most similar to this diagnosis, but we're not totally certain.
And so people with rare illnesses have long diagnostic journeys typically, just simply because they are rare, physicians don't see them as often as they do other things.
So it can take a lot of time.
And then the second group, I would say, are the sort of patient category I was referencing before, are people with so-called medically unexplained illnesses.
Basically, people experiencing a lot of symptoms, but not a lot of signs of illness.
So again, symptoms like fatigue, headaches, anxiety.
not quite feeling like myself.
I can't sleep.
There's a variety of things like that, that don't necessarily show up on a thermometer or a test for various viruses or the standard tests that a physician might do, or even just the physician is trying to do the physical exam and there's no rash.
They're struggling to piece it together.
And I think
For that category of people living misdiagnosed or without a diagnosis for a long period of time can be more common.
I really do feel like this requires improvement at almost all levels, but it is definitely, it would benefit from a systems level solution.
So on just like a very basic level, diagnostic error is, despite the fact that I think getting a correct diagnosis is perhaps something that matters immensely to most people who go to see their physician.
It's not a very widely recognized problem among medicine and the public.
It gets not the same level of attention as other things do.
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