Have you ever noticed the outdated magazines in the waiting room whenever you visit your doctor? A latest study has found that new as well as cheaper gossip magazines disappear at faster pace than the costly ones.
The more latest the publication is, more is the likelihood of their casually taken away, probably by staffs or patients.
Professor Bruce Arroll, of University of Auckland, said, “This study is possibly the first to explain the lack of up to date magazines in doctors’ waiting rooms and to quantify their loss.”
For the interesting study, the researchers took 87 magazines and stacked into three mixed piles, which were placed in the patients’ waiting room of the clinic of a general practitioner in Auckland, New Zealand.
Both the non-gossipy and gossipy magazines were included in the study. Some of the magazines include The Economist, Time magazine, National Geographic, Australian Women’s Weekly and BBC History.
The gossipy magazines were defined by the researchers as those having five or more pictures of celebs on the front cover.
Out of the 82 magazines carrying a date on the front cover, 47 were less than two months old, while the remaining were three to 12-month-old.
After 31 days, they found that 41 of the total 87 magazines had disappeared. To understand better, it has a disappearance rate of 1.32 magazines each day.
The researchers also noticed that the current magazines were at higher risk of going missing than older ones.
On the other hand, the gossip magazines were more than 14 times more likely to disappear at any time than non-gossip ones. While no magazines went disappeared out of the 19 non-gossip ones. Of the 27 gossip magazines, the researchers found only one was left.
The study was published in the Christmas issue of British Medical Journal.
