Bird Pinkerton
speaker
1,078 appearances
11 recordings
1 series
first heard Apr 2026
last heard 3d ago
Bird Pinkerton’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 — 11 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 3.
Appearances
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Unexplainable is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.
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As a journalist covering health and science, Alexandra Sifferlin got used to a very specific kind of email from readers.
They'd tell her how hard it was to get answers about what was going on with their health.
So she looked around for some numbers, like how many people have had problems getting a diagnosis or how many people have gotten an incorrect or a delayed diagnosis.
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.
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