DiagnoseThis

Don't shoot healthcare CEOs in the street. That's the opening. And it's not a joke. This is a new episode of Diagnose This. Dr. Z is joined by Alder Aspen to talk about something nobody in health content wants to say out loud: being angry isn't doing anything. In fact, it might be making it worse. When that CEO was shot, people who had never committed a violent act in their lives w...

Gen X watched their boomer parents be the good patients. Show up. Follow instructions. Trust the doctor. Don't ask questions. It didn't end well. This is a new episode of Diagnose This. Dr. Z is joined by Alder Aspen, Gen Z health advocate, to talk about what two generations of being failed by the same system looks like — and why the response has been so different. Gen X stopped expecting...

Six in ten adults in the US live with at least one chronic disease. The system treats each symptom separately. Sends you to a different specialist for every body part. Gives you a pill for the symptom and another pill for the side effects of that pill. And calls it healthcare. This is a new episode of Diagnose This. Dr. Z is joined by Meela, FMACC, to talk about why symptoms cluster for a reason —...

She woke up at 3am knowing something was wrong with her son. His labs were normal. They'd been normal for two months. He'd had spine surgery after falling 25 feet from a tree stand, recovered faster than anyone the team had seen, and then started slowing down. Fevers that came and went. Hair loss. No glimmer in his eyes. The doctors looked at his labs and said fine. She looked at the same...

Her patients come in with no fewer than 10 to 20 prescriptions. Multiple providers. Nobody talking to each other. Duplicates of the same drug class. Brown bags full of medications nobody has reviewed together in years. This is a new episode of Diagnose This. Dr. Z is joined by Cari Caraway, FNP-C, FMACP, a nurse practitioner who has spent 30 years in healthcare and the last decade in gerontology —...

She took her daughter to the doctor 15 times in two weeks. Urgent care. The ER. The pediatrician. Every time, she was sent home. The ER doctor called her a worried mother hen. They didn't want to draw blood unnecessarily. Her daughter had a rare heart disease. This is a new episode of Diagnose This. Dr. Z is joined by Jenn Sebastian, Director of Operations, to talk about something nobody names...

She was a marathon runner pulling over on the side of the road to nap. Her labs were normal. Her endocrinologist told her to sleep more and move more. This is a new episode of Diagnose This. Dr. Z is joined by Lisa, health coach, to talk about one of the most common and most dismissed experiences in healthcare: normal labs, abnormal life, and what lives in the gap between them. Lab ranges aren&#39...

A 36-year surgeon got prostate cancer. Had a metastatic recurrence. And then did something the system never trained him to do — he asked why. This is a new episode of Diagnose This. Dr. Z is joined by Dr. Harry Black, MD, FACS, retired general surgeon and author of the upcoming Cutting Through Prostate Cancer Confusion: A Surgeon's View from Both Sides of the Knife. For decades he watched pati...

They said it was anxiety. Take an Ativan. Here's a Zoloft. Come back when it gets worse. Dr. Christine Garvey had heart palpitations for years. Normal hormones. Normal thyroid. Normal heart. Every specialist said the same thing: it's emotional. She had ablation surgery she never needed. Turns out it was histamine. High histamine foods — healthy superfoods — were making her heart pound out...

Five minutes with your doctor. Maybe ten. Three of those spent reminding them why you're there. That leaves roughly two minutes to actually figure out what's wrong with you. This is Episode 14 of Diagnose This. Dr. Z is joined by Lorri, family nurse practitioner, former clinical director, and someone who has been on both sides of this — as a practitioner who spent 25 years inside tradition...

She flew in from Tijuana. Seventh stem cell treatment. Nine weeks sick. Natural killer cells depleted. Still not fully over it. She didn't get to take a week off and be sick. She came back and filmed this. This is Episode 13 of Diagnose This. And it's not about her. It's about you. Every appointment you've walked out of thinking maybe it really is just stress. Every lab result that...

23 years. She kept this quiet for 23 years. This is Episode 12. The marriage. The night she left. The decade in court. And the book he held onto for 23 years and gave to their daughter at graduation. She was in her 20s. A practitioner she admired, 25 years older. She didn't see the grooming until decades later. Once they were married, the rageaholic she hadn't seen before appeared. Then th...

She planted this story in Episode 4. You've been waiting for it. Dublin to Amsterdam. A black dot on the wing. A plane full of Irish businessmen who needed to get to work. One American woman who pressed the button anyway and said: I think we lost the front tire. The heckling started immediately. Then the captain came out. Then the announcement to the whole plane. Then the emergency landing, th...

Nine episodes of stories she was going to take to the grave. This is what they were all leading to. The Why Report starts with the question she spent decades trying to get answered: tell me why. Not AI. Real clinicians. Real software engineers. Built from scratch because when it's your health, wrong isn't good enough. You put in your symptoms — all of them, the ones every specialist told y...

$927 a month. A converted garage on a miniature pony rescue ranch. Bunk beds in her 40s. $15,000 left under the bed — and a $14,000 decision that left her with $1,000 to her name. This is Episode 9 of Diagnose This. Every number. Every jump. The one moment she genuinely didn't know if it was going to work. She signed a lease for $700 a month when her disability check was $927. Made $3,000 the...

For 35 years, nobody knew how to look. For three years after that, seven specialists and eight prescriptions didn't find it either. Nearly a million dollars a year in medical care. Constant hospital visits. And not one person asked the right question. This is Episode 8 of Diagnose This. The one where she finally tells you what actually made her sick. It was found by accident. A hematologist ordere...

Her mom was selling the house. There was nowhere to go. $927 a month in disability. A daughter who needed her to figure it out. And absolutely no idea what she was doing. This is Episode 7 of Diagnose This. The one where things turn. Not because everything was suddenly fine. Because she decided to show up anyway, one more time. She signed a six-month lease on a $700 a month office because six mont...

She had a seven-figure business. A bestselling book. A daughter she was raising alone. Things were finally good. Then a UTI became a kidney infection. The kidney infection became seven specialists and eight prescriptions. The prescriptions didn't work. And one day she woke up and couldn't get out of bed. This is Episode 6 of Diagnose This. The one Dr. Z calls her disappearing years. Three...

It was the way she said goodnight. That was it. Just something slightly off in the tone. And she leapt off a mattress on the floor and shoved her foot in that bathroom door before it could lock. She was right. This is Episode 5 of Diagnose This. And it is one of the most important episodes Dr. Z has filmed — because this is the one where the pattern finally has a name. Dr. Z was 18. Summer. Univer...

Two tires. An armed robbery. A concussion that took a year to recover from. A thesis she wrote about the worst night of her life and still hasn't read 30 years later. This is Episode 4 of Diagnose This. And it's the episode where the thread starts to become visible. Dr. Z has been diagnosing situations from tones of voice and window seats her whole life. The girl on the mat at 11. Her dad...

Her dad's name was Terry. He's not the villain in the story. He's also not the hero. He was just her dad. And losing him was one of the most complicated things she's ever had to sit with. This is Episode 3 of Diagnose This. Dr. Z goes back to the night everything changed, the night she was 16, in pajamas, glasses on, backed up against the wall by her own father. The night she calle...

Before the 15-year contract. Before the 51 staff. Before the company, the clinic, the disability, the diagnosis nobody could give her. There was a girl in junior high who painted the school hallway because she felt artistically inspired. Who shot six arrows into a bully's backyard during archery class and got hauled to the principal's office. Who stepped off the track after three laps beca...

She's in St. Croix. Caribbean Sea in her front yard. Something she's dreamed of her whole life. And she's lying on the floor with 10/10 stomach pain, eating boiled rice, gaining weight in paradise, and signing a 15-year contract that made her attorneys nervous. That's where this story starts. Dr. Z has never told the full story before. Not all of it. Not as one through line. The si...

This is a sneak peek of DiagnoseThis — a podcast for people who were told “you’re fine” when they weren’t… and for the loved ones and practitioners who refused to accept that answer. We talk about normal labs, abnormal lives, and the patterns modern healthcare keeps missing. Why symptoms get dismissed. Why stories get minimized. And why bodies whisper long before they scream. We don’t diagnose. We...