Medical Quiz Puts Doctors Through the Paces : Health: Family practitioners group makes use of game-show format to help residents sharpen their diagnostic skills.

“I’ll bet you’d like to know my credentials for this,” Alex Trebeck, the host of the popular “Jeopardy” television quiz show suggested as he prepared to take a dozen family-practice residents through the paces of a new medical quiz show here recently.

In the first place, Trebeck told the audience of 600 physicians, he helped deliver his infant son earlier this year. (Wild applause.)

“I take a Size 8,” he said, holding his hand up to demonstrate his glove size. (More wild applause.) And in the second place, he’d had “several operations on my knee.” (Even wilder applause.) And when he correctly pronounced what was wrong with the ligament in his knee, the doctors fairly shrieked with delight.

The physicians, who were attending the conference of the American Academy of Family Physicians, came to watch the semifinals and finals of “What’s Your Diagnosis?,” a yearlong competition conducted among residents in 69 family-practice programs across the country.

A dozen young physicians represented four schools in the finals--Ohio State and the University of Alabama, which were beaten in the semifinals, and Oregon Health Sciences University and the Medical University of South Carolina.

The oldest participating resident was South Carolina’s 46-year-old Jeff Buncher, who practiced as a chiropractor for eight years before deciding to go to med school.

They demonstrated knowledge of such miscellaneous medical facts as:

* The Argyll Robertson pupil is associated with syphilis.

* Burrelia burgdorferi is the name of the organism that causes Lyme disease.

* The anatomical structures in the eye that constitute the angle in “narrow-angle glaucoma” are the iris and the cornea.

They knew that the specialty of obstetrics and gynecology attracted the most malpractice suits, but they did not know that Louis W. Sullivan is secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services.

That Trebeck loved. “I know those in Washington will be really happy to discover that six of the brightest doctors in the country don’t know that one,” he said.

One of three judges on the program quickly defended, “But they have to study so much they can’t read newspapers.”

The three judges, family-practice physicians L. Thomas Wolff from SUNY Health Science Center in Syracuse, N.Y.; Edward J. Shahady from the University of North Carolina and Robert E. Rakel from Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, gave each team a “case” to diagnose.

The teams were scored on their discussion and analysis, which also brought some of the evening’s lighter moments.

Shahady faulted two teams, for example, as they struggled with a diagnosis for a 73-year-old widow with recurrent urinary-tract infections, fever and a few other symptoms.

“Another thing you don’t think about in the elderly patient is new sexual activity,” he scolded. “Lots of young people don’t consider that, but as I get older . . . “ and he trailed off.

However, the teams agonized over the cases they were given, often in hushed tones so that neither audience nor judges could hear.

Said Shahady, “Well, I understand that. You don’t always want others to know the dumb things you’re thinking.”

He said more points were awarded for further questions and tests the residents said they needed than were awarded for diagnostic guesses based on an incomplete set of clues.

The idea for the competition came from Frank A. Oski, chief of pediatrics at Johns Hopkins Medical Center, and his associate, Julia A. McMillan.

When the two were in the pediatrics department in SUNY Syracuse, they used the quiz (known by students as medical Jeopardy) as a teaching technique.

Oski suggested it to TM Marketing Inc., which does work for Johns Hopkins, and Linda Loch Alger of TM produced the program.

This year’s grant for $25,000, donated by Miles Inc. Pharmaceutical Division, was won by South Carolina team members Jeff Buncher, the ex-chiropractor; Diana Gaviria, 30; and Roy Smith, 28, who out-diagnosed Oregon on a complicated postpartum case.