Dave Munger has been spending a lot of time in waiting rooms:
When it comes to waiting rooms, it turns out, eye doctors wipe the floor with everyone else's ass. Not only does the eye doctor have the least shabby interior decor, it also arguably offers the best selection of reading material and visual entertainment (in the form of an infomercial for Lasik surgery on a 40-inch plasma TV mounted on the wall).
Here at the allergist nearly all the magazines are of the complimentary local shoppers' guide variety. We've got Charlotte Woman, the area Seniors guide, and a holistic medicine brochure. The other magazines aren't much better: Better Homes and Gardens, and a copy of Medizine's Healthy Living featuring Christina Applegate.
The poor magazine selection in doctors' offices is a staple of lazy stand-up routines, but it works because there's some truth to it. Our GP and my allergist have the obligatory collection of six-month-old copies of Time and Sports Illustrated and The New Yorker. I'm ok with that, because it's not like I read those anywhere else, but there is the occasional moment of irony, such as the NFL playoff preview issue of SI that had the Giants as one-and-done, with Tom Coughlin to be fired. That was an amusing read in late February.
Of course, it could be a whole lot worse...
After the first-trimester screen test, we were referred to the "Women's Health Center" of the local university hospital for genetic tests and other diagnostics, as we had been deemed a "high-risk" pregnancy. The waiting room there contains nothing that is not baby-related-- piles and piles of copies of Conceive magazine, plus a handful of other pregnancy magazines, and informative medical fliers about prenatal health issues.
The first time there, I would've killed for a six-month-old Sports Illustrated. I would've liked to kill whoever chose the reading selection, but really, anybody with reading material that wasn't taunting me would've been at risk. And we had at least managed to conceive-- I can only imagine how irritating the reading selection must be to people there for fertility treatments. Sitting around for half an hour looking at glossy photographs or happy babies with an imperative title (it's hard not to read that as "CONCEIVE!!!") has to be positively soul-crushing.
A tip for the doctors and future doctors reading this: People sitting in waiting rooms are not necessarily hugely enthusiastic about being reminded about their medical problems. I realize you probably get free promo copies of all this crap, making it the easiest possible way of decorating your waiting room, but if ever there was a space that demands escapist literature, your waiting room is it.
So, for God's sake, get some six-month-old copies of Time and Sports Illustrated and People. Your patients will be much happier. If you're too cheap to pay for a subscription, steal them from Dave's eye doctor.
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Where is your sense of whimsy? I like to smuggle in a few issues of Science and WIRED. Stand downwind afterward sniffing for that ineffable charred neuron scent.
I have rolls of gold-foil address labels printed up that say only;
and affix them to The Economist, Scientific American, New Scientist, Wired, MIT Technology Review and National Geographic. Then I take a stack with me to leave anytime I visit the doctor office. It just seems like a shame to throw them away after reading them.
Isn't it ironic that the waiting rooms with the best reading are the ones where you're least likely to be in a condition to read? I know I get annoyed that I can't read after having my eyes dilated.
My psychiatrist has the best and they're recent too. I don't think I've ever seen anything there older than 2 months.
MKK
There's absolutely no excuse for docs not having good, recent reading material in their waiting areas. Most docs get constant solicitations from magazines offering incredibly reduced-price subscriptions. However, given the amount of garbage mail I've seen coming through the house of one physician, I can tell you that many of these offers end up in the shredder with all of the other propaganda.
As a non-parent by choice who has also been through several gynecological surgeries, I always found the magazine selection in GYN offices to be utterly grim. On one pre-surgery visit some years back, when I'd forgotten to bring my own reading material, I was incredibly grateful to see a sports magazine lying amidst the piles of mom-to-be literature in the waiting room, even though I'm not a big sports fan. In fact, the issue contained some interesting ads for men's undies -- modeled by some very attractive major leaguers -- and this raised my spirits considerably.
Incidentally, for a patient who is not planning to have children, baby magazines are merely uninteresting. But, I can't imagine how awful it must be for a patient being treated for fertility problems to be bombarded with images of nothing but babies. It only seems like common courtesy for offices to provide some alternative reading.