the fragility of love

This book about the practice of diagnosis and the need for it to be better was a fascinating addition to my collection on the current state of healthcare. In The Elusive Body: Patients, Doctors, and the Diagnosis Crisis, Alexandra Sifferlin does really interesting work to unpack what the issue with diagnosis really is: why so many people get incorrect ones, the potential costs that can have, and how it might be able to get better.

One of the answers, naturally, is how much of our healthcare system comes down to insurance, which needs a clear diagnostic code for many tests to be justified, making it ideal to jump to the easy answer and stick to it. Various biases also encourage this—the easiest answer is the most likely, but when that's colored with fatphobia, misogyny, or racism, it can do damage. An astonishing 1 in 15 people will, at some point in their lives, have a rare health condition, and yet doctors are often too quick to dismiss the rare entirely. Partially due to time pressure and partially to the lack of hands-on medical education, the physical exam and listening portions of a doctor's visit are becoming lost arts despite being the most crucial pieces of the puzzle according to all data. There's also a marked lack of collaboration between kinds of doctors—even in good systems, your cardiologist rarely talks at any length with your primary care or dermatologist.