Solution: Health Check-up

Answer: DEEP TISSUE

Written by Sim Hong Jhun

Solvers are presented with three pages of “medical reports” in typical doctor’s handwriting (although a copyable Google Sheets template is available). At the bottom of each page is an “Additional Comments” section which clues a medically related 5-letter acronym or abbreviation. These are, in order: NSAID, OBGYN and COVID.

Each page also contains 10 lines of information, parts of which have been especially hastily written (represented by 5 u’s). Replacing the hastily written portions with 5-letter words will complete these lines of information. At this point, solvers may notice that many of the 5-letter words share letters that are found in the corresponding 5-letter medical acronym, as shown below. Letters in common with the corresponding medical acronym are highlighted below in green.

Page 1 (NSAID):

Page 2 (OBGYN):

Page 3 (COVID):

The next step is to “stack” the pages front to back (as shown on the left of the “scanning diagram” provided), then “scan” the stack from top to bottom (as shown on the right of the “scanning diagram”). For example, the topmost layer is composed of the first words of each of the pages, as such:

The matching (highlighted) letters in each of the layers form letters (‘D’ in the example above), and doing this for the remaining nine layers in order will yield the final answer DEEP TISSUE.

This puzzle was conceptualised in 2020, way before Wordle had blown up. Apologies to solvers who might have been tripped up by this! Extraction using binary was also commonly attempted during test-solving, but this can be ruled out with words that either completely share or don’t share letters with the corresponding medical acronym (e.g. INDIA, DIANA and WHOLE on the NSAID page).