Today’s guest post comes from Clyde.
As my wife’s permanent chauffeur, I spend much time in medical waiting rooms. Even though I have learned to bring my own entertainment, I have informally cataloged what is provided as reading and viewing material.
One clinic provides nothing because they believe that the reading material spreads germs. Two have taken out play areas for children on the same principle.
As a casual observer of marketing, I notice how the marketers have, as they will, found the captive audience. A few places provide the standard array of magazines, usually with a plastic cover over them on which are imprinted ads for the company which paid for the magazine.
Much more common is to devise ways to market medical services and products, almost entirely drugs, to the captives. Or is that victims? Let’s say patients or impatients, as is maybe more often the case. The two favorite media are TV screens and medical-interest magazines. The technology is slowly expanding. It usually extols the virtues of the organization holding you prisoner. Ads for drugs are also slowly creeping in.
I scan the medical-interest magazines before reading my Dickens or Hardy, two authors I read in waiting rooms because it takes an environment such as that to make them interesting. Most clinics contain two types of such magazines: a general medical health publication, or ill-health as I shall explain, and a magazine aimed at the focus of that waiting room, such as arthritis or neurology.
The content of these magazines has made two things clear. 1) No disease is real until someone famous gets it, or as second-best, the parent of a famous person. 2) There is a myriad of diseases of which I should be terrified, things of which I have never heard, which get catchy names as if Madison Avenue named them. Did it?
Overstatement is standard fare, especially on the cover. For instance one magazine on its cover suggested that all Boomers have a mysterious disorder called HepC, which turned out to be hepatitis C. The reason, as I read inside, is that we all, it seems, shot up drugs, shared toothbrushes, and participated in orgies. I guess I wasn’t invited.
The purpose of these magazines is ads for drugs, with long legal statements in very minute print, too small for most of the patients in the waiting rooms to read. Another Madison Avenue decision? The listed side-effects are more terrifying than anything Stephen King would dare write. All the ads tell me to ask my doctor about the drug, meaning to prescribe the drug. I tried to talk my wife into taking a list of the drugs in with her and asking her doctor about each of them. My wife has no sense of fun.
Doctors hate ads like that, and they hate articles which tell people that they have the latest dread disease. But I am quite sure the management of the clinic or hospital is placing them there and not the doctors.
The slowest passage of time known to humans is that spent in waiting rooms. People need distraction, but the content of the TV screens and the magazines seems to me so contrary to what people really crave or to the purpose of the visit.
What would you put in medical waiting rooms to distract and or comfort people?
Trail Baboon 