ISBN: 0593136640 9780593136645

Category: Medical / Diagnosis

Page count: 320

<b>A collection of more than fifty hard-to-crack medical quandaries, featuring the best of <i>The New York Times Magazine's </i>popular Diagnosis column—now a Netflix original series</b><br><br><b>“Lisa Sanders is a paragon of the modern medical detective storyteller.”—Atul Gawande, author of <i>Being Mortal</i></b><br><br>As a Yale School of Medicine physician, the <i>New York Times </i>bestselling author of <i>Every Patient Tells a Story, </i>and an inspiration and adviser for the hit Fox TV drama <i>House, M.D., </i>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. <br><br>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.”<br><br>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, <i>Diagnosis</i> 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.