Healthcare India Podcast : The Ghost in my Body
Fri Feb 06 2026
What happens when five decades of unexplained symptoms collide with the limits of modern medicine?
In this episode of the Healthcare India Podcast, Dr Vikram Venkateswaran speaks with Haresh Patel—entrepreneur, systems thinker, and author of The Ghost in My Body. What begins as a conversation about diagnostic failure, fragmented data, and the blind spots of specialisation evolves into something far deeper.
Drawing on his lived experience of seeing more than a dozen specialists over fifty years, Haresh reframes illness not as a single-diagnosis problem, but as a systems failure—one that medicine is not structurally designed to solve. The discussion explores why healthcare rewards specialisation over synthesis, how longitudinal data and pattern recognition are consistently underused, and why AI must augment—not replace—human intuition.
Unexpectedly, the conversation takes a spiritual turn. Beyond data, technology, and architecture, Dr Vikram finds himself confronting a dimension he did not anticipate—where meaning, awareness, and the human search for coherence intersect with clinical science. The “ghost” turns out to be not just in the body, but in how we understand healing itself.
This episode will resonate with clinicians, founders, technologists, and anyone questioning whether the future of diagnosis lies only in better tools—or in deeper insight.A conversation that starts with systems thinking and ends by challenging how we define health, certainty, and care.
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What happens when five decades of unexplained symptoms collide with the limits of modern medicine? In this episode of the Healthcare India Podcast, Dr Vikram Venkateswaran speaks with Haresh Patel—entrepreneur, systems thinker, and author of The Ghost in My Body. What begins as a conversation about diagnostic failure, fragmented data, and the blind spots of specialisation evolves into something far deeper. Drawing on his lived experience of seeing more than a dozen specialists over fifty years, Haresh reframes illness not as a single-diagnosis problem, but as a systems failure—one that medicine is not structurally designed to solve. The discussion explores why healthcare rewards specialisation over synthesis, how longitudinal data and pattern recognition are consistently underused, and why AI must augment—not replace—human intuition. Unexpectedly, the conversation takes a spiritual turn. Beyond data, technology, and architecture, Dr Vikram finds himself confronting a dimension he did not anticipate—where meaning, awareness, and the human search for coherence intersect with clinical science. The “ghost” turns out to be not just in the body, but in how we understand healing itself. This episode will resonate with clinicians, founders, technologists, and anyone questioning whether the future of diagnosis lies only in better tools—or in deeper insight.A conversation that starts with systems thinking and ends by challenging how we define health, certainty, and care.