Not all doctors are known for their winning bedside manner—a fact that isn’t lost on actress Laura Dern. After her mother, actress Diane Ladd, was hospitalized with pneumonia, an HRCT Scan showed unusual scarring on her lungs. They then waited for the doctor to explain what it meant.
She has something called idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis, and there’s nothing you can really do,’” Dern recounted at the Women’s Health Lab on May 18, 2026, in New York City. And with that, the doctor turned and left the room, providing no other information or context. Idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (IPF) is the most common type of interstitial lung disease (ILD), a group of conditions that cause inflammation and scarring in the lungs.
IPF affects about 200,000 people in the U.S., and “it’s a progressive disease, which means it worsens over time, and leads to more lung dysfunction,” Rany Condos, MD, a New York City-based pulmonologist, told the audience. As the disease progresses, breathing can become more difficult as the lungs struggle to fill with air and deliver oxygen to the bloodstream. IPF can be easily mistaken for other, more common conditions, including COPD or asthma, and it can take years to get the correct diagnosis, as was the case for Ladd.
Condos added: “Sometimes it’s not until something tragic happens—like the patient ends up in the hospital with pneumonia—that somebody realizes that in fact they had a chronic lung disease that wasn’t being diagnosed.” Despite her genteel southern upbringing, Ladd wasn’t one to sit back and do nothing. So they went to a different hospital, where they found “an extraordinary pulmonologist who was so joyful and hopeful and supportive of her,” she added. Much of this was done over walks, which served as both physical and emotional therapy.
The walks also sparked deeply personal conversations that eventually became the basis of their jointly authored 2023 book, Honey, Baby, Mine. It’s important to spot the warning signs early and never settle,” Dern told the Women’s Health Lab audience. Ladd’s pulmonologist not only encouraged her to get out and get moving, but also to keep working if it made her happy.
That sometimes meant finding ways to overcome challenges. Dern recalled her mother being offered a movie to film in Savannah, Georgia, but had concerns about being unable to fly. Get somebody to go with you.
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