Lisa Sanders

Lisa Sanders (born July 24, 1956) is an American physician, medical author and journalist, and associate professor of internal medicine and education at Yale School of Medicine. In 2002, she began writing a column for The New York Times called Diagnosis, that covered medical mystery cases. She is an attending physician at Her column was the inspiration for the television series House M.D. House M.D. and Yale-New Haven Hospital, where she works, served as the model on which Princeton-Plainsboro Hospital was fashioned for the series. She worked as a consultant on the show. In 2019, Netflix began airing the program Diagnosis, featuring a selection of cases from her column.

Quotes

 * It's hard to listen to a story that's not told well. That's a terrible thing to say, but we all feel this. You know, when we're at the dinner table and Uncle Dave is telling a long, windy story, what you're really thinking is, "Where is this going? What is the bottom line?" That kind of impatience is not just limited to the dinner table; that's often how doctors feel. When you didn't have any other [diagnostic] tools except that story, you just buckled down and listened. But now that we have other [high-tech] tools, we feel like, "O.K., I'm out of here."
 * In response to the question "One of the recurring themes in the book [Every Patient Tells a Story: Medical Mysteries and the Art of Diagnosis] is the fact that too few doctors sit down and hear out the patient's story. Why is that?"