UNTREATABLE.COM
Patient has been handed a napkin-wrapped fork, knife, and spoon at a mid-range restaurant. Patient unwraps them, holds the fork up to the pendant light, rotates it, identifies a single water spot, and proceeds to wipe each piece thoroughly with the cloth napkin. Has, on prior occasions, dipped a fork's tines into their water glass. The server, on the other side of the room, has clocked this. The server, tonight, is not in the mood.
Chronic. The inspection is, apparently, a pre-meal opener.
None. Every restaurant reset the ritual from scratch.
Patients with Pathological Restaurant Cutlery Inspection typically present with some or all of the following:
Pathological Restaurant Cutlery Inspection belongs to the Institute's growing taxonomy of behaviors that real medicine has declined to name. It exists, roughly, at the intersection of internet culture, interpersonal friction, and whatever is happening in the lives of our patients. It is fictional and it is everywhere.
Under its Latin label Investigatio argenti gastronomica, the condition appears only in the Institute's own catalog. Real clinicians do not recognize the term. They recognize the behavior.
Think you have it? Find out what else you might be suffering from at the diagnosis generator. Or browse the full index of afflictions.