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Crowdsourcing “Diagnosis” on Netflix

A reality show for people who love medical mysteries

Female doctor in white coat listens to a patient's heart with a stethoscope.

One of the biggest questions in medicine is always, “What is wrong with this patient?” In the emergency department, the right diagnosis might keep the patient alive. Determining the cause of a chronic problem can be much trickier.

As we know, second opinions can make a big difference. In her 2019 streaming series “Diagnosis,” Lisa Sanders, M.D., FACP, found a way to bring together a whole planet full of “consultants” to find answers to baffling medical problems.

Advising on TV Show “House”

Sanders, who’s now the medical director of the Long COVID Multidisciplinary Care Center at Yale New Haven Hospital, began her career as a journalist with “Good Morning America” and CBS News. She went to medical school 18 years later to pursue her interest in what she calls her medical detective work.

For many years, Sanders has written the column “Diagnosis” in The New York Times Magazine. Back in 2004, her column helped to inspire the TV show “House,” with Hugh Laurie. Sanders was one of the technical advisers on that show. After it ended, she wondered if she could bring her medical mysteries to the screen more directly.

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The result was this made-for-streaming reality series, produced as a collaboration between Netflix and The New York Times, which sought to “crowdsource” tough diagnoses.

A Mystery With a Transatlantic Solution

The first episode of “Diagnosis” will give you an idea of the format. It introduces Angel Parker, age 23, living in Las Vegas. She suffers from periodic bouts of excruciating pain, but no doctor has been able to determine a cause. Her big dreams of becoming a nurse practitioner are all on hold because she ends up hospitalized every three months in a vain search for answers.

All this has left her deep in medical debt — we learn that Sanders found her after seeing the GoFundMe campaign Parker started to help pay her hospital bills.

Sanders creates a video in which Parker describes her symptoms and medical history for a global audience. It gets a huge response: More than 1,600 replies come in during the first two weeks. As Sanders has already warned Parker, many of the suggestions are wrong, but some may be worth a closer look. Parker also receives many well wishes, making her feel more supported than before.

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Parker’s previous doctors had already ruled out MS, lupus, and autoimmune diseases. Many of the crowd-sourced responses suggested that it could be a metabolic disease destroying muscle and organs, resulting in abnormal bloodwork and discolored urine.

Serendipitously, a medical student from Italy, working at a hospital that specializes in just this kind of illness, presents the video to her committee, which offers Parker testing. Because the Italian healthcare system is taxpayer-funded, Parker learns that the tests will be free — quite a commentary on our different health systems.

A Doubly Happy Ending

Ultimately, Angel Parker’s condition turned out to be CPT II, a fatty acid oxidation disorder, which can be managed with diet and supplements. Finally receiving the correct diagnosis changed her life. She went on to finish nursing school and became a working RN — a doubly happy ending.

There haven’t been any more episodes of “Diagnosis” since 2019, so the show’s format hasn’t revolutionized medical diagnosis. However, if you enjoy medical mysteries, each of the seven existing episodes is a good way to spend 45 minutes.


CHRISTINE CONTILLO, RN, BSN, PHN, is a public health nurse with more than 40 years of experience, ranging from infants to geriatrics. She enjoys volunteering for medical missions.


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