Jonathan Fields

Until next time, I'm Jonathan Fields signing off for Good Life Project.

So that 10% adds up to millions of people every year living with a missed, a delayed, or a wrong diagnosis.

Maybe you're even one of them.

Maybe someone you know or you love is one of them.

Well, my guest, Alexander Sifilin, spent years inside this problem, talking to the country's best diagnosticians, tracing families who waited decades sometimes for answers, and mapping exactly where the system is breaking down and what to do about it.

Her book, The Elusive Body, Patients, Doctors, and the Diagnosis Crisis, is the most clear-eyed account that I've read of what's actually happening when medicine can't tell you what's wrong and what you can do about it.

I'm Jonathan Fields, and this is Good Life Project.

And I want to start with a phrase that stuck me cold.

We'll jump right into that after this short break.

So we're having this conversation, I think, a really interesting time.

We're a couple of years on the tail end of this big global pandemic where a lot of people were deeply reacquainted with their own physical and psychological well-being.

A lot of people suffered.

And a lot of people started asking big questions.

And also a lot of people, I think, became a lot more attuned to what was going on in their body.

They kind of

Any little thing that was happening, they started asking, what is this?

You talk about something that you describe as a diagnosis crisis.

What do you actually mean by that?

And why does it matter so much now?

Yeah.