What got me into the book was an incorrect diagnosis from a doctor that I made instantly. It lets them see what doctors see, feel the uncertainty they feel-and experience the thrill when the puzzle is finally solved. Intricate, gripping, and full of twists and turns, Diagnosis puts readers in the doctor's place. Sanders shows how making the right diagnosis requires expertise, painstaking procedure, and sometimes a little luck. In each of these cases, the path to diagnosis-and treatment-is winding, sometimes frustratingly unclear. 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.' Now the rash has turned purple and has spread across her entire body in whiplike streaks.

A middle-aged woman returns to her doctor, after visiting two days earlier with a mild rash on the back of her hands. Hours later, he collapses on the dance floor with crippling stomach pains. 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.Ī twenty-eight-year-old man, vacationing in the Bahamas for his birthday, tries some barracuda for dinner.

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.

New york times dr lisa sanders