As I settled into the standard-issue clinic waiting room
chair, I noticed across from me a young blond woman was gazing into the middle
distance. She was the first thing I noticed, on the cover of the top magazine
on the table. The simpering smile told me instantly the blond was Taylor Swift.
The second thing I noticed was the magazine’s title. It wasn’t a celebrity
magazine like People or a women’s
lifestyle magazine like InStyle. It
was much more unexpected than that.
Maybe it’s just because I haven’t settled into a clinic
waiting room chair and scanned the selection of magazines for quite some time,
but Taylor Swift’s cover’s title caught me by surprise: Web M.D. Think about that for a second. WEB M. D. Many of the magazines
of my youth that were piled high on the inherited-from-my-great-aunt
half-circle end table that was wedged between the couch and my dad’s Laz-E-Boy
are no more. Newsweek for example is
no longer tangible, but virtual. Yet, here in my doctor’s office, Taylor Swift
is smirking up from the magazine table on the printed cover of a concept that
started in the virtual world and has—apparently—jumped into the tangible one. At
the time, I didn’t think too much about Taylor Swift. But after I got home, I
started wondering about healthcare and a print magazine whose title begins with the
word “Web.”
The fact is, new clinics are springing up all over my
Northland Kansas City suburbs. And once the postmodern, wastefully soaring-ceilinged,
new buildings are open for business, Web M.D.
magazine will probably grace their waiting room tables and racks as well.
My husband blames the Affordable Care Act for the irritatingly inefficient buildings
that are popping up to house groups of nurse practitioners and general
practitioners. But I can’t help but wonder if Web M.D. isn’t partly to blame.
Here’s why: On Saturday, my abdomen started cramping after I
ate dinner. It hurt enough to give me chills and send me to bed. It happened
again on Sunday after lunch. And that’s when the Googling began. Have you ever
done that before? Googled your symptoms? I remember my first time. I was living
almost a thousand miles away from my parents for the first time in my life and
I quickly became convinced I had ovarian cancer. Ultimately the doctors ruled
that out but they couldn’t find a diagnosis or anything to make the pain go
away for good. Then I went to the chiropractor because my back hurt. A crack
and a pop and Surprise! my ovaries felt normal again. Web M.D. makes it very easy to fall down that rabbit hole.
This time, thanks to the Internet, I feared that I had
diverticulitis. It was the lower, left-side abdominal pain that tipped me off.
The first runner-up in my self-diagnosis pageant was an ectopic pregnancy but diverticulitis
won the tiara. Ultimately, the fear and worry caused by my Internet diagnosis
drove me to make an appointment on Monday morning instead of going to work and
seeing if it got any better.
And so goes my theory: Web
M.D. sends more and more people to clinics. Clinics support Web M.D.’s print edition. People see the
magazine in the waiting room, thereby reinforcing the impulse to turn to Web M.D. and increasing the need for
more clinics. Once you Google your symptoms, the seed is planted that your
stress headache is actually an embolism, just waiting to kill you. Your mind
and your symptoms can’t be put to rest until you go see a doctor.
As for my abdominal pain, an x-ray confirmed what my
grandfather probably would have been able to tell me, were he still alive and
abdominal pain was the sort of thing we talked about in our family. And what he
would have told me is this, “You need to poop more. Here take some castor oil.”
Instead, I paid my $25 co-pay for cancer causing beams to be shot through my
baby-maker and a person with more years of student loans than years of actual
medical practice could tell me to go to the store and buy a laxative/stool
softener.
So I went, and I bought, and I took, and I’m waiting. I just
can’t help but think, though, that Taylor Swift owes me a song about poop.
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