Jonathan Fields

I mean, you just shared the stat that the typical person, I guess, will have at least one misdiagnosis or missed diagnosis, um, and their experience.

And I think we all kind of feel like, all right, if it's something small, no big deal.

You like it's, it's this bug versus this bug and we'll get over it.

But when the stakes start to get higher, you know, when you're walking through each day, suffering significantly and not knowing what's going on, um,

This could be really devastating.

I mean, it's, you know, beyond naming, you know, an injury or an illness saying like, okay, so we know what this thing is and like, here's what it is.

I mean, what does a diagnosis actually give a person emotionally and socially and practically?

Yeah, I mean, when you hear a story like that, and probably a lot of people either have their version of it or they know somebody close to them that has some version of that.

But my mind immediately goes through, why didn't somebody do that one definitive thing years earlier that would have clearly shown, okay, so this is something we can point to and resolve?

What's happening in medicine that stops those things from happening?

Yeah, I mean, you brought up a couple of really, I think, important issues too.

One is, on the one hand, you're sitting there saying, why didn't somebody just order that scan or that imaging so we could see it?

But you brought up the other side of this, which is, you know, we have also been talking for a long time about going to really expensive diagnostics procedures without them being warranted or way too quickly or way too early and often the cost that's associated with them.

can be incredibly high.

So there's this delicate balancing act I would imagine practitioners are doing.

They're like, we want to get as much information as we can to figure this out.

And at the same time, if we just say, let's order every test available to see what we can find, insurance probably is not going to cover a whole bunch of that.

If they're within a hospital or administration, it's going to look at those things and say, this is actually not the way that we do things.

So imagine the practitioner themselves are also doing a really delicate dance here.

Yeah.