Do you see what I see?
In radiology, an incidental finding is the thing you were not looking for. Sometimes it is nothing. Sometimes it is the most important thing on the scan.
I have come to think that is not only true of imaging. It is true of careers, of character, of the people who change the direction of a life. Almost nothing that mattered to me was ordered in advance. This is a conversation about what arrives unrequested — in medicine and in the rest of it.
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The most consequential things are the ones nobody ordered.
An incidental finding is what the scan shows you when you were looking for something else. Radiology has a whole grammar for it — how to describe it, when to chase it, who is accountable once it is on the page. Medicine takes the unrequested seriously, because it has learned what it costs not to.
Ordinary life has no such grammar, and it is at least as full of them. I did not plan the specialty, or the executive career, or the writing. Each turn that mattered arrived sideways: a conversation that ran longer than it should have, a question I could not put down, a person who was not on the schedule. If I am any version of myself worth being, it was assembled almost entirely out of things I was not looking for.
So the show has two strands and one premise. Some episodes are about imaging, governance and the economics of prevention — the work I am qualified to argue about. Others are about attention, acceptance, and the small unremarkable moments that turn out to have been load-bearing. They are the same enquiry: what are you not looking for, and what is it costing you not to see it?
There is a tension in the title worth naming rather than resolving. The findings are incidental; the attention is not. What arrives unrequested sits outside your control — but whether you were paying attention when it did, and whether you have learned to meet an ordinary day with intention rather than on autopilot, is almost entirely within it.
Intention and acceptance are within our control.
Two from the reading room. Two from everywhere else. The show tests all four.
Every CT, every MRI, every chest film carries information about the whole person that was acquired, paid for, stored, and never read. The question is not whether to collect more. It is why we discard what we already hold.
When something is missed, the instinct is to look for the individual. That instinct is usually wrong and always expensive. The better question is what the workflow, the incentive and the reimbursement made likely.
We narrate our lives as though we chose them, because the story is tidier that way. Very little of mine was chosen. The encounters that redirected it were not on any plan, and pretending otherwise makes us worse at noticing the next one.
Accepting a fact and giving up on it are different acts, and confusing them causes a great deal of unnecessary suffering. You can hold a situation accurately and still work at it. Most of the peace I have found came from getting that distinction right.
Eight episodes across two strands. Field episodes are built on work already published or presented. Life episodes are not about medicine at all. Episode status is shown honestly — nothing here is available until it says it is.
Held for season two: speaking to the radiologist, the wrong yardstick for value, and remote monitoring as the functional half of measuring muscle.
Both strands take guests, and they are not the same guests.
For the Field strand: clinicians, health economists, regulators, engineers, and people who had to make the decision rather than write about it. The show is more useful when the guest holds a position I do not.
For the Life strand: anyone whose life turned on something they did not plan, and who has thought honestly about it since. You do not need to work in medicine. You do not need a platform. You need to have paid attention.
Guests get the questions in advance, and nothing is released without your review.
Whichever strand you come for — you need to have paid attention, and to have learned to live with intention in life’s everyday moments.
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Views expressed on Incidental are personal opinions and general information only. Nothing on this page or in any episode is medical, psychological or clinical advice, and no episode discusses identifiable patients. Where research is cited, the underlying work is listed on the publications page.