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Diagnosis

Solving the Most Baffling Medical Mysteries

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Diagnosis

Written by: Lisa Sanders
Narrated by: Lisa Sanders
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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. Physical Illness & Disease Science Sociology Medicine Health Medical School
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What the critics say

“Lisa Sanders is a paragon of the modern medical detective storyteller. . . . But what sets her apart is her Holmes-like eye for the clues—and her un-Holmes-like compassion for those who suffer.”—Atul Gawande, author of Being Mortal
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I've really enjoyed reading LIsa Sanders' "Diagnosis" pieces when they've occasionally appeared in the New York Times. Unfortunately, I think that "occasionally" is the key to that enjoyment. The stories which appear in this collection have a remarkable sameness, one-after-the-other: a patient becomes inexplicably ill, gets taken to hospital, physicians are puzzled, then physicians are not puzzled, some explanation of the disorder is given to the reader, and the patient generally gets better. The quality of the narrative writing is similar to the "Drama In Real Life" pieces in the Reader's Digest, although those vary enough in time, place and circumstance to give more variety. I think that this book would work well in print as a bathroom reader, just long enough for one to do one's business. Listening to multiple stories in sequence, though, the they blur and only the sometime oddities of the diseases create moments of curiosity and interest. Dr. Sanders is not a strong narrator, although she pronounces the medical terminology correctly (yay!). In fact she sounds pretty much like a senior physician recounting a case—something I hear a good deal of during my work day—but which doesn't have much dramatic punch. While I commend Dr. Sanders for collecting these cases, I can't recommend this audio book. As noted above, though, I would recommend the print version.

Sick, Diagnosis, Better. Repeat.

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Interesting medical mysteries solved. The documentary is very good too. Lisa Sanders knows the value of networking.

Very informative!

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Terrible narration. Very uncomfortable voice that was difficult to listen to. Wudnt recommend because of this.

Diagnosis

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