After a few minutes of feeling vaguely ill, you enter a messy string of symptoms into a search bar and click the first result. You’re slightly concerned to confirm your suspicions — WebMD says it’s cancer. In actuality, it’s a long-running meme based on the truth that your symptoms can mean anything, and that no one on the internet has enough of your personal information or health records to make an educated guess about your diagnosis. But what if even after your Googling spree, your trip to a medical professional also ends with the doctor as confused as you? What’s the next move? That’s the question that Dr. Lisa Sander’s hit Netflix show, Diagnosis, centers around.
Dr. Lisa Sanders is an American physician, medical author, professor, and journalist. Since she was a child , she had a love for Sherlock Holmes — the detective at the heart of the famous 1880s mystery stories. So it makes sense that a grown-up Sanders became famous for writing her own series of real-life hard-to-solve medical mysteries in the form of a column for The New York Times. Her column was such a smash hit that it inspired the creation of House, M.D., the iconic TV medical drama. A couple of years following her success, Dr. Sanders started posting previews of cases a day early, inviting her global audience to ponder, discuss, and make their guesses before she posted her own diagnosis the following day.
She enjoyed a positive reception to the cases closed through crowdsourcing, and that precedent allowed her to turn the column into a docu-series on Netflix, identically titled Diagnosis. The show functions as a case study on crowdsourcing: the concept that items, services, ideas or finances can be sourced from random volunteers. Dr. Lisa Sanders posts her clients’ circumstances and medical information online, to be seen globally by doctors, researchers, and sufferers. The viewers comment with their hypotheses or even just information that may be relevant. Sanders uses this information to take forward steps in diagnosing her clients. This puts crowdsourcing to the test in the medical field, in hopes of utilizing it for the most notable of causes: saving people’s lives.
Can the internet be useful in diagnosing cases that stump even America’s best doctors? Dr. Lisa Sanders’ hypothesis is clear from the beginning: “whether or not you’re going to get a diagnosis really depends who’s in the room and who sees something they recognize and understand,” she says. Our knowledge is shaped by our unique experiences, training, and personal interests. The more people in the room (or doctors), the higher the chance that there’s someone with relevant interests or training that ensures that they will have the answer. The internet makes the medical examination room international, and Sanders shows us how to take crowdsourcing from clumsy to compelling.
Early in the series, Sanders watches a social media editor design a template that would enable her crowdsource for medical advice. There’s a carefully constructed script including photos, video, graphics, medical records — as much information as possible, readily available in the same place and time. Showing this part of the process first in detail emphasises the art of asking for information. It’s not black and white, but some types of content lends itself better to particular platforms, and some platforms are better suited to accomplish particular things.
“A lot of those answers will be wrong,” Dr. Sanders tells Angel, a patient whose chronic muscle pain episodes are analyzed by everyone from experts to amateurs to randoms. “But some answers will be thoughtful, and some of those answers may be right.” As Dr. Sanders implies, there can be an overwhelming amount of information out there, and we have to be adept at sifting through the answers. Good detectives are open-minded, but the ultimate goal is to narrow down plausibilities. Sanders figures out whose answers to trust, and how to logically apply the crowds’ answers to the patient’s unique situation and medical records. While some patients don’t find satisfying answers at first, Sanders’ efforts eventually orient patients in a promising, and many times unconsidered, direction.
Diagnosis “closes” every case, even ones with no happy ending in sight. But Sanders reveals there’s a mindset for that too. “It’s a diagnosis to nowhere,” says the tearful mother of a child with episodes of paralysis due to the first recorded case of a super-duper-rare gene combination. “I think that our kids are going to help future kids and future parents not go through what we went through.” Although crowdsourcing found many people who knew what the medical problem was, no one has come up with a way to treat the medical condition yet. Luckily, the internet creates a record of interactions and attempts to solve problems. Perhaps you’ve Googled a computer error and found a solution on a forum post from several years ago. Someone has to be the first to ask. Someday, their noble effort will help solve the problem and be referenced by everyone in the future who doesn’t have to wonder.
Even then, there isn’t always a solution, no matter how many people Dr. Sanders asks. How is she able to “close” each case effectively then? Her secret weapon is relentless optimism. She digs until the patient finds something they can feel better about. This series is humbling, heartwarming, and downright humanizing: a crash course in empathy and the fragility of life. The world always falls short of a cure. Sanders often falls short of an explanation. The difference is that she never fails to leave patients hopeful. Diagnosis is an almost-too-charming illustration of how approaches as creative as crowdsourcing can be delightfully effective in changing the world.
Fran Mbadiwe
Please note that opinions expressed are the author’s own. They do not necessarily reflect the views and values of The Blank Page.
