A Medicine Dilemma | Riddle #14

Hello Everyone!  Lets kick off this week with an excellent riddle, which I really enjoy!  This one has a few details, but overall takes a lot of logical and problem-solving skills to solve.  Hope you enjoy it as well!

Mr. Pointer, a successful businessman, has come down with a dangerous heart disease.  Mr. Pointer’s personal physician said that the disease needs 2 separate types of medicine, called Med-A and Med-B, to treat the disease.  However, the disease was thought to be eradicated, and production for both types of medicine had ceased.

However, due to Mr. Pointer’s influence, the physician was able to find a single bottle of Med-A and Med-B on the black market.  To all knowledge, these are the last pills of Med-A and Med-B in existence.  Mr. Pointer was given a single bottle of “Med-A” and a single bottle of “Med-B”.  Each bottle contains 20 pills, and Mr. Pointer was given strict instructions by his physician:

• Take one pill of Med-A and one pill of Med-B everyday.  If you take either more or less, it will be fatal.
• The medicine must be taken for exactly 20 consecutive days.  Since there are only 20 pills of each type of medicine, you cannot be wasteful.

Mr. Pointer went home, and obeyed the physician.  However, a week later, Mr. Pointer had a dilemma.  Mr. Pointer had grabbed one Med-A pill and accidently grabbed two Med-B pills.  That may not seem like a major problem, but it was.  Med-A and Med-B are indistinguishable and are impossible to identify from each other.  Mr. Pointer had placed the single Med-A pill and the two Med-B pill into a pile, and now Mr. Pointer does not know which pill is which!

This was a major dilemma…Mr. Pointer can only take one of each pill everyday.  Mr. Pointer cannot throw any pills away, because he has the exact amount of medicine to treat the disease…any less, and Mr. Pointer would die.  Buying more medicine is also not a possibility, since these are the last in existence.

How does Mr. Pointer overcome this problem?

Put your answers in the comment section below!  This one took me a little bit to solve.  I hope you have fun, and I will be back later this week, and remember to do WLYF!

Answer Key to Last Week’s Riddle:

—Darkness—