“Flick knife attack” does not necessarily happen in a dark alley outside a nightclub. Neither does “hippo-defence” show up in the swamps of Africa. These are exotic names of moves in chess crafted by grandmasters. In the same line, “trigger-finger” or “tennis-elbow” is not restricted to a gun-toting cowboy or a Wimbledon contestant, but ailments found loitering outside the doctors’ clinic. Look carefully, and you would find an uncanny similarity between the “high IQ” grandmaster and the average “family” doctor.
The grandmaster sits quietly in front of a chessboard, seemingly doing nothing, intermittently moving a small piece now and then. Be it a novice or a grandmaster, there are only 20 possible “first” moves in chess.
To a parent, there are just two reasons a child catches a fever: playing in the rain or eating ice cream. They come to see the doctor for a legal prescription of paracetamol — and injection for repeat offenders. Mostly, the doctor follows the parental advice. That is the right “first” move.
Despite such a humble start with merely 20 first-move options, as the game of chess reaches the fifth move, an enormous 400-billion options spring up, and that is when the game gets more intense.
If the fever does not go away by a weeks’ time, the doctor contemplates the next move: lab tests and scans. If the problem settles in the next few days, the need and motive for all those unnecessary tests are doubted; if not, the very first move is questioned.
The assumption that the doctor knows everything at first glance is as wrong as inferring that the grandmaster knew of the result from the very first move. Most fevers turn out to be nothing but a nuisance — loss of sleep for the parents, lost classes and tasteless rice gruel for a few days for the child, and everything is forgotten. But even serious infections such as meningitis, pneumonia, dengue and leptospirosis and malignancies start with a simple fever.
Guzzling energy
Everyone agrees that chess is a high IQ game, but does not understand how energy intensive it is. In 1984, grandmaster Anatoly Karpov lost 10 kg after a world championship; in 2004, grandmaster Rustam Kasimdzhanov’s weight went down by 8.5 kg after just six games. Robert Sapolsky, a neuroscientist from Stanford, in an experiment in 2018 on Mikhail Antipov, calculated that the grandmaster spent 560 kilo calories during a two-hour chess competition, matching Roger Federer’s energy consumption playing an hour of tennis singles. Energy intensive work need not always be in tracksuits and headband. The homemaker, the schoolteacher taking classes online and the doctor scribbling illegible handwritten prescription are queuing close behind the chess grandmaster, doing invisible calorie-burning.
Sometimes, in the middle of an interesting chess match, the grandmasters suddenly get up, shake hands, and declare it a draw, leaving most of us bewildered. While amateur players can see most available options in front of them and little beyond, grandmasters in contrast can see much ahead. In an interview, chess prodigy Magnus Carlsen revealed that he could see up to 15 steps ahead with all the possible combinations; but that is after the game has shaped up. The grandmaster can sense an imminent danger much before the king is threatened, and a call of check is given.
The doctor too gets the hint of the outcome of a disease much before others, by way of a disturbing biopsy report, an abnormal shadow in a scan or a deranged blood test. His suggestion on the next course of action often looks out of context, leaving the patient and attendants bewildered. “The biggest challenge of medicine is to watch the terminally ill patient, knowing that you have very little to do, while telling him not to worry.”
The human body with 30 trillion cells turn out to be more unpredictable than those 64 black-and-white “cells” on a chessboard. But, unlike chess, the doctor needs your help in this game of health.
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