Medical Centaur
by Ian Tullis
Answer: GOUT
Our long-winded friend is clearly referring to a BINGO game that uses the three cards given. The complaints that she refers to are all given BINGO-like classifications (a letter B, I, N, G, or O plus a number in the appropriate range) in the ICD-10, the World Health Organization's system for classifying medical conditions. Each sentence references exactly one condition, and all the B conditions appear in numerical order in the same paragraph, and then all the I conditions, etc.
- B1, chicken pox
- B2, shingles
- B3, smallpox
- B4, monkeypox
- B6, German measles
- B8.8, foot-and-mouth disease
- I20, angina pectoris
- I21, myocardial infarction
- I22, recurrent myocardial infarction
- N31, neurogenic bladder
- N35, narrow urethra
- N36.0, false urethral passage
- N39.3, stress incontinence
- G47.3, sleep apnea
- G51.0, Bell's palsy
- G54.7, phantom limb syndrome
- G56.0, carpal tunnel syndrome
- G57.5, tarsal tunnel syndrome
- O62.3, precipitate labor
- O63, long labor
- O66.3, complications from conjoined twins
- O75.0, maternal distress during delivery
Treating the classifications as numbers (ignoring the tenths, as instructed) and marking them on the three cards produces these shapes:
This looks like: M 10 =. The ICD-10 condition labeled M10, and the last condition to which she refers, is GOUT.