Crippling stomach pains. Purple rashes. Splitting headaches. Why is it so intriguing to read stories of people dealing with something very wrong with their health and learning the step-by-step process doctors take to figure out just what’s wrong? If you love this sort of thing, this week you can get a double dose of medical adventure with the publishing of Diagnosis: Solving the Most Baffling Medical Mysteries, a selection of over 50 stories from Dr. Lisa Sanders’ bi-weekly New York Times Magazine column, and a seven-episode Netflix docu-series of the same name—also dropping this week. To find out why so many of us are so intrigued with this topic, we sat down with Sanders, an internist on the faculty of the Yale University School of Medicine.

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What is it about puzzling medical cases that’s so fascinating?

Everybody has a body so we can all relate. For me, this work is a wonderful combination of two things that I love: I love how the body works and I also love mysteries. I’ve always been a huge Sherlock Holmes fan. Arthur Conan Doyle was actually a doctor before he became an author.

Can fans expect a lot of overlap between your column and the Netflix show?

When I write my column, I have 1,300 words to tell a complicated story. With this Netflix series, we get to do something I don’t have time to do which is to really tell the person’s story. I think of it this way: I have a moment in my column but people don’t have diseases for moments—they sometimes have them for a long time. For example, in the column I’m writing now, the health issue unfolded over two years. That happens. Sometimes it’s quick, but to the person this is happening to even something quick lasts too long.

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Tell us: Where do you get your stories?

I get them everywhere. I ask every doctor I meet whether he or she has any good stories. And I have my own stories from my patients. I would love it if people would share their stories at parties but, in general, people are too considerate and thoughtful to do that. Every now and then, someone tells me about this or that rash and I just say ‘get on the table and let me examine you.’ That’s usually a funny moment.

Do you think patients are wrong to expect doctors to have all the answers when it comes to the weird things that can happen to our bodies?

I think doctors were and many are still quite uncomfortable with patients understanding how much uncertainty there is that surrounds medicine. People talk like medicine has been going on for thousands of years and sure there was Hippocrates but we didn’t know anything about how bodies worked until the 20th century.

Related: Unwrapping Medical Mysteries 

What’s the secret sauce for stories that make it into your column?

To make it into my column, the scenario has to be interesting to me. Yes, weird diseases are interesting to me, but what I’m really interested in is how it’s figured out. I’m interested in how the puzzle gets solved. I’m also interested in everyday ordinary illnesses and why figuring it out was difficult for some reason. One of my favorite columns is the one I begin my book with. It’s about a middle-aged woman from Kenya who grew up in the U.S. but decides to take her two teenage kids to visit the country for the first time. She comes back and feels very, very sick. It ends up being this long story about her and how she thinks she has malaria. After several weeks in and out of the hospital, she meets another doctor who discovers that she has hyperthyroidism. Because she had traveled to an exotic place, for a lot of reasons it was hard for her previous doctors to get there mentally, to think that she didn’t have malaria. I love this story because it shows how our brains work when they’re assigned a puzzle like this.

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