Jonathan Fields

I mean, and if you're an ER doc, right, and somebody comes in, you may never see them again.

You anchor to a certain extent, especially some of the early part of the book in the story of a particular family, the Proctor family.

Take me into that a bit, because I think it's really it illustrates a lot.

Yeah, I mean, it's so powerful because you literally have an entire family that's affected by this, trying to figure out what's going on for years.

But especially if it's something where it's really rare, there's probably not going to be much, if any, literature about it.

So even if you did all the testing that you could do, if nobody has really identified, like, this is a thing happening,

How is a doctor supposed to then put all the things together, especially if it's a new condition, and say, like, this is something entirely new and different that we're seeing.

Like, we're going to name this now.

I mean, it's interesting that there would be an entire center dedicated to this at this point.

I'm curious, and you may or may not know this, what does it take to qualify to get seen by someone at that center?

Let's talk about the actual act of diagnosis, because I would imagine also we have a lot of ideas in our heads.

We all watch a lot of TV.

We see all the medical shows and what's depicted on them.

It's like, you know, like how to diagnose like somebody comes in and nobody can figure it out.

Well, how does diagnose actually happen in the real world versus what we imagine?

Yeah, I would imagine, you know, on the one hand, it's a little bit mysterious, even mystical.

But a lot of what's happening under the hood, it sounds like, is years and years and years of intense, to a certain extent, memorization of, you know, like, this set of things is most likely to be this set of, you know, like, of diagnostics or illnesses with this at the top and this less likely and this less likely.

But so much of that also has to do with the physician's ability to gather the right information.

Um, the physical exam, this is something that you speak to, which is, you know, I think so many times these days you go to a doctor and they never touch you.

Um, and as a kid, you know, that was kind of like, how can that even be possible?