A collection of more than fifty hard-to-crack medical quandaries,
featuring the best of The New York Times Magazine's popular Diagnosis
column--now a Netflix original series
"Lisa Sanders is a paragon of the modern medical detective
storyteller."--Atul Gawande, author of Being Mortal
As a Yale School of Medicine physician, the New York Times bestselling
author of Every Patient Tells a Story, and an inspiration and adviser
for the hit Fox TV drama House, M.D., Lisa Sanders has seen it all.
And yet she is often confounded by the cases she describes in her
column: unexpected collections of symptoms that she and other physicians
struggle to diagnose.
A twenty-eight-year-old man, vacationing in the Bahamas for his
birthday, tries some barracuda for dinner. Hours later, he collapses on
the dance floor with crippling stomach pains. A middle-aged woman
returns to her doctor, after visiting two days earlier with a mild rash
on the back of her hands. Now the rash has turned purple and has spread
across her entire body in whiplike streaks. A young elephant trainer in
a traveling circus, once head-butted by a rogue zebra, is suddenly beset
with splitting headaches, as if someone were "slamming a door inside his
head."
In each of these cases, the path to diagnosis--and treatment--is
winding, sometimes frustratingly unclear. Dr. Sanders shows how making
the right diagnosis requires expertise, painstaking procedure, and
sometimes a little luck. Intricate, gripping, and full of twists and
turns, Diagnosis puts readers in the doctor's place. It lets them see
what doctors see, feel the uncertainty they feel--and experience the
thrill when the puzzle is finally solved.
