I hate tabloid media!!

[paranoid-viking]

My anxiety goes up and down this days but it does not take much to trigger the worst in me. And today it did. Nice sunny day; out for a walk in town beforemy eyes cathces the headline of the trashiest leading tabloid/gossip newspaper in this country: "being overweight leading to cancer" while I take a little look inside without buying it(God knows I am not giving these MFers money)and there it is: being overweight leads to all kinds of cancer. Oh, thank you; now my day is ruined. I want to send a mail to these "journalists" telleing them that they are destroying lifes with their scaremongering headlines; these people are not doctors or experts on the human body. They do scaremongering for the greedy reason of earning money. Well, well, godd things is that fewer and fewer are buying these toilet paper magazines. I am using AdBlock for their webpage so they are getting nada from me anyway.
I am overweight and fear sometimes that I have done it; that it is all too late. Oh, how I HATE the tabloid media and many of their journalists.

[Cakelady]

I hate these papers too, I think they should be taken to task for the scaremongering headlines, obviously nothing intelligent to report:lac:
Quite often when you read behind the headline there is no basis for these stories, there's usually alot of "might", "possibly", "may" but nothing concrete & most often not quoting a reliable source. Haha, I "might" walk down the street & get abducted by aliens but I "definitely" won't ( would take my mind of everything else though :roflmao:xx

[paranoid-viking]

Yeah, passing a law that only allows profesionals in medicine to write about cancer symptoms and causes of cancer would be something. Tabloid media is not interested in the public health or making people "aware"; it is pure greed and tricking peole into buying there trashy papers. Same with the clickbait garbage. Many of their so called journalists should get some proper and useful jobs for society instead; like cleaning public toilets or picking up dog dropings.

[bin tenn]

A lot of people read those things and they just know better than to believe it. The tabloids aren't the problem here; anxiety is. Trust me, I get it. Things like that used to set me off all the time. I would think "they really shouldn't be allowed to say these things in public." I eventually realized that was wrong. It doesn't matter if they say those things; my anxiety was the problem.

[paranoid-viking]

But why are the tabloids doing this? It is not for the sake of the public health; that is for sure. It is for tricking people into paying for their shit. And shortly after they publish their trash the doctor offices are rund down by hypocondriacs convinced that they have a terminal cancer. It is harmful what they are doing and they know it.

[Gary A]

Weeeeellll....

Being overweight does increase your chances of getting certain cancers. The same as spending too much time in the sun increases your risk, as does smoking, drinking in excess, eating the wrong types of foods too much etc etc.

Being overweight is never a good thing, it can lead to a lot of health conditions. I wouldn't have thought this was a secret to be honest.

I do agree that tabloids can and do exaggerate and scream attention grabbing headlines far too often, but at the same time the medical community do have a responsibility to keep the public informed of things that could be damaging to their long term health.

[paranoid-viking]

Yes, the medical community. And it does. I am talking about this issues with my doctor and I am working on it. But tabloid media is not a part of the medical community and all they want is cash regardless of what they are doing. A leaflet at my docs office have a leaflet from the national cancer ascosciation catering to men past 40 with things to look out for but without the aggresive scaremongering from the tabloid media. And which also points out that such and such signs may be caused by other things than just cancer. Something you rearely or never see with sensationalist media crap.

[NancyW]

Agree Gary!

There are so many things we don't have control of. But come on folks let's control the things we are able to, lose weight, get active, don't smoke, and eat healthy.

[Weasley123]

I'm not overweight but I feel the same. Everything leads to cancer. I've never had kids by choice which increases breast and ovarian cancer risk. Plus I drink wine and I eat junk on weekends. I'm very fair do melanoma. I also take birth control pills which protect ovarian and contribute to breast can't win

[paranoid-viking]

I love the song that ridicules The Daily Trash:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q3chJN9DCGg

[bin tenn]

But why are the tabloids doing this? It is not for the sake of the public health; that is for sure. It is for tricking people into paying for their shit. And shortly after they publish their trash the doctor offices are rund down by hypocondriacs convinced that they have a terminal cancer. It is harmful what they are doing and they know it.

Believe it or not, there are so many people who find them entertaining. They don't take the headlines at face value. They know the headlines are pretty much trash. That's what some consider entertaining though. You don't think the mainstream news is any better, do you?

[MyNameIsTerry]

They keep telling us WWIII is on the horizon. Does that scare you? It does other anxiety sufferers.

Imposing censorship is a slippery slope, just like the media bias we have to be wary of.

But what % of the world have HA? Given the media fights back against interest groups trying to change or close them, and many such groups only to it because they want only their narrative peddled, they aren't going to change for a small group of people scared by health articles. And to be fair to them, even if they right them via a doctor, HAers will still be triggered, just by real facts. You know this, this board is chocca with people reading a true medical resource and their anxiety tries to twist things.

If you stop the media, how do you cope with a real life scenario via word of mouth? The anxiety is still in there.

Better to learn not to panic than to practice lifelong avoidance.

I'm not minimising the issue of the scaremongering media though, you know I agree about a lot of it, but I think we have to look at it from other angles, and not just HAers.

[paranoid-viking]

I think I only read about the imaginary threat of World War 3 from the "news" that comes up when logging out for Hotmail; and being very informed about what goes on in the world I say that is trash and BS too. But anything for a headline.

I dont know how many HA sufferers there are worldwide; but according to a leading expert on hypocondria in Norway;dr. Ingvard Wilhelsen; they are about 1,25% of the population in this country; but that is only confirmed cases; I bet you there are plenty of "closet hypocondriacs" and/or people in denial about being hypocondriacs out there. Hypocondria is thus more common than; lets say....pancreatic cancer.

Just calculated; acording to such a percentage there should be at least half a million HA sufferers in the UK.

[raggamuffin]

Don't read the tabloids then. The media relishes focusing on the negative traits of humanity; the wars, the death, murder, corruption etc. Very few news articles are positive.

The media in that respect doesn't have your best interests at heart. It's overwhelmingly negative and sensationalist.

The media also focuses on topics completely out of our own control. What fuels our anxiety the most? Often situations completely out of our control. So why add to that burden by reading about a world of other people's problems on a daily basis.

Ed

[paranoid-viking]

Don't read the tabloids then. The media relishes focusing on the negative traits of humanity; the wars, the death, murder, corruption etc. Very few news articles are positive.

The media in that respect doesn't have your best interests at heart. It's overwhelmingly negative and sensationalist.

The media also focuses on topics completely out of our own control. What fuels our anxiety the most? Often situations completely out of our control. So why add to that burden by reading about a world of other people's problems on a daily basis.

Ed

While I am a pesimist about lots of things; especially health; I am an optimist about the future of tabloid media; that it is dying thanks to Internet. Fewer and fewer people are buying their sorry excuse for "newspapers" which is more worthy of being toilet paper; and more and more people(like me)are using AdBlock to prevent them for getting clickbait money. So I am very optimistic about a coming mass bankrupcy of tabloid media.:yahoo:

[MyNameIsTerry]

I think I only read about the imaginary threat of World War 3 from the "news" that comes up when logging out for Hotmail; and being very informed about what goes on in the world I say that is trash and BS too. But anything for a headline.

I dont know how many HA sufferers there are worldwide; but according to a leading expert on hypocondria in Norway;dr. Ingvard Wilhelsen; they are about 1,25% of the population in this country; but that is only confirmed cases; I bet you there are plenty of "closet hypocondriacs" and/or people in denial about being hypocondriacs out there. Hypocondria is thus more common than; lets say....pancreatic cancer.

Just calculated; acording to such a percentage there should be at least half a million HA sufferers in the UK.

If you were on the GAD board you would see members afraid of terrorism, war, civil unrest, etc. I used to be triggered by such stories too. It's not just HAers that have problems with the media.

Like you say, it's BS. It is. But did you go into a panic, obsess over it and maybe come on here to write a thread about it? I bet you just dismissed it with a "meh". And that's where you will get too when you recover from your HA.

The point being, if we stop one trigger, we stop them all. In which case we probably end up with newspapers only telling us about TV listings, classifieds, sport & any new openings of public services or investment in our services, etc.

It's much better to harden yourself to it all. The media is so over the top with everything these days and if anything, they will just get worse. The last year or so of politics in the US & UK are certainly showing us this.

I'm sure you are right about the hidden HAers. They existed before all this too but everything is much more connected these days so it's more visible but at the same time it's bound to have grown due to progress too.

[Mav]

OMG, I KNOW!

I hate the stupid MSN and YAHOO pop ups that for somereason always open up before I can google something and it's always something like

"Do you know the signs of pancreatic cancer?"
"Mother of 2 dies due to not detecting signs of ovarian cancer?"

The list goes on...