Cyberchondria

[Peter Moylan]

I've just seen a newspaper headline saying

'Cyberchondria': Is Dr Google making you sick with worry?

The reporters might be too young to realise that this is not a new
problem. It used to be known as Readers Digest Syndrome.

--
Peter Moylan Newcastle, NSW http://www.pmoylan.org

[Peter T. Daniels]

On Thursday, August 18, 2022 at 6:07:59 AM UTC-4, Peter Moylan wrote:

> I've just seen a newspaper headline saying
>
> 'Cyberchondria': Is Dr Google making you sick with worry?
>
> The reporters might be too young to realise that this is not a new
> problem. It used to be known as Readers Digest Syndrome.

"An article a day of lasting interest,"

I only read(past) Reader's Digest for the jokes.

But it was profitable enough that the Wallaces endowed the
New York Public Library's Periodicals Division.

[CDB]

It was, or maybe is, useful for learning a language if you can get an
issue in that language: lots of short pieces, usually simply written,
and jokes that give you a quick reward when you figure them out.

WP says the magazine is published in twenty-one languages.

[Peter T. Daniels]

On Thursday, August 18, 2022 at 12:04:53 PM UTC-4, CDB wrote:
> On 8/18/2022 11:24 AM, Peter T. Daniels wrote:
> > Peter Moylan wrote:

> >> I've just seen a newspaper headline saying
> >> 'Cyberchondria': Is Dr Google making you sick with worry?
> >> The reporters might be too young to realise that this is not a new
> >> problem. It used to be known as Readers Digest Syndrome.
> > "An article a day of lasting interest,"
> > I only read(past) Reader's Digest for the jokes.
> > But it was profitable enough that the Wallaces endowed the New York
> > Public Library's Periodicals Division.

Its reading room, decorated with a lot of frescoes devoted to
publishing, is now the anteroom to the reading room of the
Dorot Jewish Division. But when they moved the Jewish Division
to the far southwest end of the main floor, they left the Jewish
stacks where they were, in the far northwest corner two blocks
away. You used to request something and they'd go in the back
and get it. Now they only page items every half hour, and then
it takes a while.

> It was, or maybe is, useful for learning a language if you can get an
> issue in that language: lots of short pieces, usually simply written,
> and jokes that give you a quick reward when you figure them out.

Yes. We had an issue in French class; one of the articles was
"Bobby Hull, le comète blonde." I knew I'd seen it, but I couldn't
find the issue to discover whether all the other articles were
from the same original issue.

We also had a good supply of Reader's Digest Condensed Books
(four per volume). Once or twice I later read one whose condensation
I'd read and discovered that they accomplished it by leaving out all the
artistry the author had put in.

> WP says the magazine is published in twenty-one languages.

I think they used to list more each month,

Like The Watchtower.

[Ross Clark]

Yes, that was amazing to me as an adolescent language-geek -- languages
I'd never heard of! Jehovah's Witnesses in Africa!

Once, waiting for a bus, I discovered a wall-mounted box containing free
Christian Science literature, some of which (who knows why?) was in
Bahasa Indonesia. Having found English and Indonesian versions of the
same issue, I spent quite a few happy hours working through the text,
figuring out what meant what and how the sentences fit together. Of
course I soon forgot almost everything I'd learned, but some of it came
back to me years later when I got seriously involved with Austronesian
languages. (At that time, I acquired a stack of Watchtowers in Samoan,
but never made much use of them.)

[Peter Moylan]

In my student days, I discovered that the jokes are published in a
different order in the different editions. By buying the German edition,
I could get jokes that wouldn't appear in the English-language edition
for several months.

Of course, it also worked the other way around. Half the jokes in German
had already appeared in English months earlier. But it got me /some/
jokes that my friends hadn't heard.

I never got around to checking whether the articles that appear between
the jokes were different in different languages.

(Why German? Because that was the edition that was stocked by a bookshop
I often went to.)

[occam]

On 18/08/2022 12:07, Peter Moylan wrote:
> I've just seen a newspaper headline saying
>
>    'Cyberchondria': Is Dr Google making you sick with worry?
>
> The reporters might be too young to realise that this is not a new
> problem. It used to be known as Readers Digest Syndrome.
>

Who can forget such formulaic titles as: "I am Joe's Liver"
bringing medical conditions to the public, well before the internet. A
hypochondriac's dream publication, interspersed with jokes to keep the
reader engaged.

A friend of the family had a whole yellow section of his library full of
past editions. That, and past copies of the National Geographic.

[Peter Moylan]

I wonder how Joe is going these days. The poor guy had more than his
fair share of medical problems.

Doctors' waiting rooms almost always had copies of the Readers Digest
back then. The GPs used to read it to find out what problem their
patients were going to have that month.

[Peter T. Daniels]

I don't think I'd ever bothered to interpret the slogan "An article a day
of lasting interest" back when I had access to the magazine -- to
discover whether the February issue was thinner than the others!

[Sam Plusnet]

I suspect this type of hypochondria dates back to well before Readers
Digest came on the scene.
There were a number of self-help books on Health, Illness and Injury -
intended for home use - published in the mid to late 19th Century.

--
Sam Plusnet

[Kerr-Mudd, John]

I note especially threemeninaboat starts off that way. Dunno when RD
started getting people worried.

--
Bah, and indeed Humbug.

[Snidely]

Kerr-Mudd, John is guilty of
<20220819194425.911b...@127.0.0.1> as of 8/19/2022
11:44:25 AM

February 1922.

At one point I was in contact with a bunch of bound volumes of early
(but maybe not that early) RDs. I think I was successful in finding a
place to donate them.

/dps

--
"What do you think of my cart, Miss Morland? A neat one, is not it?
Well hung: curricle-hung in fact. Come sit by me and we'll test the
springs."
(Speculative fiction by H.Lacedaemonian.)