The magazines that people read when waiting for a medical check-up at the doctor's office are often outdated. Why don't doctors stock up on current magazines for their waiting rooms? Now, a new study is shedding light on this mystery.  

There are mainly two possible reasons why there is lack of certain magazines in the doctor's waiting room. One reason is that the doctor or his staff may not be buying new magazines and the other is that the patients are stealing them. It appears that patients actually steal them.

For the new study published in the BMJ on Dec. 11, Bruce Arroll, from the Department of General Practice and Primary Health Care at the University of Auckland in New Zealand, and his colleagues investigated why the doctor's waiting room tend to have old and crappy magazines so he set out to find out what happens to current magazines.

The researchers gathered 87 magazines that are either gossipy marked by the presence of at least five celebrity photographs on the front cover and non-gossipy types such as the likes of Time magazine, BBC History, the Economist and National Geographic and then placed them in the waiting room of his practice making sure that the clinic staff do not take them.

Of these magazines, 47 were less than two months old and 19 were categorized as non-gossipy. There were 27 gossipy magazines, 15 of which were what the researcher described as most gossipy for having up to ten celebrity photos on the cover.

After a month when about 3,000 patients had been in the waiting room, the researchers found that 41 or nearly half of the magazines had disappeared. Interestingly, while none of the non-gossipy magazines disappeared, 26 or 96 percent of the gossipy magazines did.

Arroll and colleagues said that the result of the study suggests that doctors do not place old magazines in their waiting room. It just happens that the newer ones disappear with magazines disappearing at the rate of 1.32 copies a day. They also said that since new and gossipy magazines are more likely to disappear faster than the non-gossipy ones, a way for doctors to save on costs is to use old copies of non-gossipy magazines.

"On the grounds of cost we advise practices to supply old copies of non-gossipy magazines," the researchers wrote. "Practices should consider using old copies of the Economist and Time magazine as a first step towards saving costs."