Bird Pinkerton

speaker

831 appearances 10 recordings 1 series first heard Apr 2026 last heard 2d ago

Bird Pinkerton’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 10 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 3.

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Unexplainable · When doctors don't know what's wrong · 15 Jul 2026 podcast

It's hard to answer those questions exactly, but there have been some attempts to gather data on this.

Now, that does not mean that every person will have a doctor miss a cancerous tumor or something.

There is a spectrum here, and some of those errors are less devastating than others.

But still, that is a lot of diagnostic error.

In her research, Alexandra was also exploring questions about why this was happening, why it was sometimes so hard to get a diagnosis, what even goes into a diagnosis in the first place.

Such a big project, in fact, that it turned into a book called The Elusive Body, Patients, Doctors, and the Diagnosis Crisis.

And as Alexandra got deeper into her research for that book, she started digging into one story in particular, the story of a woman with an incredibly rare disease.

That story reflected a lot of the problems that Alexandra was encountering with diagnosis more generally.

And so this is Unexplainable.

I'm Bird Pinkerton.

And today on the show, we are doing a book club.

Alexandra Siverlin, author of The Elusive Body, will tell us about this one woman's journey to a diagnosis and how it illuminates both the problems with how we diagnose disease and how we might do a better job of answering people's unanswered health questions.

Let's start with an introduction to a woman named Louise Proctor.

But in 1980, when Louise was 25 years old, her life started to change.

the amount of time that she could walk without experiencing pain got shorter, and the pain got worse.

So, of course, she talked to her doctor about it.

This lack of a diagnosis went on for decades.

In the midst of all this, Louise also had two children to take care of.

And in 1984, her infant daughter, Suzanne, was diagnosed with cystic fibrosis.

This was devastating for Louise.

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