It is, in short, a great place for a diagnostic detective. She’s seen cases of typhoid fever, dengue fever and many other exotic maladies. Because Waterbury has a large and diverse immigrant population, her practice is global in scope. “It’s a hard place to live, but it’s a great place to be a doctor,” says Dr. And she practices medicine at a Yale resident’s clinic in Waterbury, Connecticut, a hardscrabble Rust Belt town northwest of New Haven, where she lives and teaches. She’s written books, including her 2009 work Every Patient Tells a Story. Sanders not only writes her Diagnosis column, which first ran in 2002. “My worry was that they would think I was some kind of loser, floundering and looking for a sinecure,” she says.Ī glance at her résumé would tell you that’s a pretty laughable notion. When she got her Emmy, she was thrilled because she figured it would bolster her application to Yale School of Medicine. In 1989, when she decided to go to med school, CBS agreed to send her, thinking it would improve her medical reporting. She started out as a TV news producer, first at ABC and then at CBS. Thus began a fascinating career straddling journalism and medicine that produced the long-running Diagnosis column in The New York Times, which inspired the TV show House, for which Dr. “I found this other story that I didn’t even know existed: the diagnosis story.” In medical school, year three is when students are allowed to interact with real live patients. Basically all stories, I thought, were some variation on those three possibilities.”

“New diseases, new diagnostic tools and new drugs. “When I came to medical school, I had covered medicine for six or seven years, and I felt like I knew all the stories,” she says. Lisa Sanders, MD, was 39 and in her third year of medical school-a midlife career change that followed an Emmy Award-winning career in television medical journalism-when an epiphany struck her.

Dr sanders new york times