Learn the medicine behind the games
Plain-language guides to the reasoning, tests and anatomy that Stat! puzzles are built on, written for students and anyone curious about medicine.
Clinical reasoning
The clinical workup: from first complaint to diagnosis
How clinicians turn a presenting complaint into a diagnosis, with a focused history, a targeted examination and tests chosen to answer a question rather than to fish for one.
5 min read Clinical reasoningDifferential diagnosis: how clinicians narrow the possibilities
How to build a list of possible diagnoses, weigh how likely each one is, and pick the question or test that splits the list. The same logic solves Traits and Syndrome.
4 min read Clinical reasoningThinking in organ systems, disease types and acuity
How medicine sorts diseases by body system, by underlying mechanism and by time course, and why those three labels cut a long list of possibilities down so quickly.
4 min read Clinical reasoningClassic clinical associations: findings that point to one disease
Some findings travel together so reliably that they suggest a diagnosis almost on sight. A tour of the classic pairings, and the traps where one finding fits several diseases.
4 min readLabs, vitals and imaging
Reading lab results: what high, low and abnormal really mean
Where reference ranges come from, why one in twenty healthy people falls outside each of them, and how to read the common blood tests that show up in clinical cases.
5 min read Labs, vitals and imagingVital signs: the five numbers that frame every case
Temperature, heart rate, blood pressure, breathing rate and oxygen saturation, with normal adult values, the patterns that matter, and why a trend beats a single reading.
5 min read Labs, vitals and imagingImaging basics: X-ray, ultrasound, CT and MRI
What each imaging test is good at, what it costs in time and radiation, and how clinicians choose the right one for the question they are asking.
5 min readAnatomy
Anatomical position, planes and directional terms
The shared vocabulary for describing where anything is in the body, from anatomical position and the three planes to pairs like anterior and posterior, medial and lateral, proximal and distal.
4 min read AnatomySurface anatomy: finding the organs from the outside
The bony landmarks and simple rules of thumb clinicians use to locate the heart, lungs, liver, spleen, kidneys, appendix and major pulses on the surface of the body.
5 min read