68 Time August 26, 2019
TimeOff Television
For many oF Dr. GooGle’s mosT anxious
patients—the ones who consult WebMD’s Symp-
tom Checker more often than the weather report—
Lisa Sanders is a household name. A physician
and author based at the Yale School of Medicine,
Dr. Sanders has been writing a column called
“ Diagnosis” for the New York Times Magazine
since 2002. Each edition follows a patient with a
mysterious ailment from desperation to, yes, di-
agnosis, like a whodunit where the culprit lurks
somewhere beneath the skin of a victim who can
almost always be saved. These doctor-as- detective
stories provided the basis for Fox’s House.
Sanders’ oeuvre takes a new form on Aug. 16
with the Netflix docuseries Diagnosis, a more
straightforward adaptation of her column. In place
of Hugh Laurie’s misanthropic Dr. House, with his
prickly bedside manner, we get the reporter her-
self, a keen-eyed and empathetic interlocutor who
seeks answers for some of America’s most perplex-
ing patients. More than the comforts of a tidy pro-
cedural, each episode offers a moving case study
of a life derailed by an affliction that has doctors
stumped. What unites these very different pa-
tients from across the country, many of them kids
or young adults, is an urgent need for health care
more thoughtful and intensive than what is cur-
rently available to them.
By the time we meet each patient, they’ve ex-
hausted all local resources; some have even sought
help at prestigious university hospitals or the
Mayo Clinic. Precocious 7-year-old Sadie suffers
from frequent, unexplained seizures. Matt has put
his college career on hold because of fainting spells
during which his heart actually stops. After comb-
ing her subjects’ medical records and conducting
extensive interviews with them and their families,
Sanders writes up their stories and posts them
online. Videos proposing diagnoses pour in from
health care workers, researchers and other patients
around the globe. New physicians get involved,
new leads emerge, and new tests are performed.
This isn’T an aesthetically pleasing show. Occa-
sional surgery footage aside, there’s quite a bit of
blurry web video. But the wisdom of this compas-
sionate crowd could almost restore your faith in
the fundamental goodness of the Internet. (TNT’s
Chasing the Cure, a reality series with a simi-
lar premise, inspires less optimism. Its live epi-
sodes, hosted by Ann Curry, have an exploitative,
game-show feel, building suspense around diagno-
ses patients react to in real time.)
Voices from across the political spectrum
like to boast about the quality of coverage their
health care solution would provide. In April,
President Trump tweeted a vow that “the Repub-
lican Party will be known as the Party of Great
HealtCare [sic].” Centrist Democrats counter pro-
gressives’ support for Medicare for All with the
insistence that people who like their private insur-
ance plans should be allowed to keep them.
Yet amid all this bluster, there’s been frustrat-
ingly little talk about what desirable health care
actually looks like. A godsend for its subjects and
a compelling watch, Diagnosis serves the greater
purpose of contrasting the limited care so many
Americans receive with the inspiring outcomes of
tireless, personalized searches for answers. In one
case, doctors in Italy—where health care is pub-
licly funded— perform expensive tests at no cost to
the patient. We see how distracted or overworked
providers can undermine families’ trust in the pro-
fession and how breadwinners can get hit with
the double whammy of astronomical medical bills
and long absences from work. Sanders encounters
obstacles at government agencies like the VA and
NIH—but in her role as de facto case manager, she
never lets patients fall through the cracks.
Diagnosis isn’t magic. Episodes rarely end in a
cut-and-dried cure. But their outcomes are extraor-
dinary enough to feel miraculous nonetheless. REVIEW
The doctor
as detective
By Judy Berman
DIAGNOSIS: NETFLIX; LODGE 49: AMC; THE RIGHTEOUS GEMSTONES: HBO
△
On the Netflix series
Diagnosis, patients
whom doctors have
struggled to heal
take center stage