First Issue Review – Rx Magazine

Rx is the first thing a doctor writes on a prescription, it is shorthand for the Latin phrase Recipe X in which X represents the remedy. Roughly translated, it means Take this… Rx is also the cryptic title of The Sunday Telegraph’s new health magazine. The new section is aiming at attracting a younger, bigger audience to the paper *Sunday Telegraph Grows.

RX Front Cover Rx certainly has a young feel about it. The introductory pages Eureka would look at home in Guardian2. There are two short questionnaires, this weeks were with Weight Watchers and Miriam Stoppard; these are sandwiched between useless facts, such as everything you didn’t want to know about hiccups. Then, as quickly as a nettle sting, Rx starts to get better.

There is an absorbing debate about the pros and cons of legalising cannabis and some well written rambling about therapists. Ruby Wax begins her weekly column with a piece about how we are all taken in by the health industry. Wax’s piece may bit a bit close to the knuckle for some, but it proves that her pen is as sharp as her tongue.

For those people into alternative healthcare, Rx will keep you up to date on the cures and the codswallop in the witch-doctor’s medicine cabinet. On the conventional side of medicine, the magazine looks at cutting edge treatments. This week Rx examined the latest experimental treatments for Parkinson’s disease. The final pages are filled with typical consumer health features: healthy eating recipes, exercises for a flatter stomach and a psychologist’s answers to readers’ problems.

Rx will be enjoyed by anyone who is keen to try anything if it promises to make them look better and live longer. However, it is unlikely to attract many more younger readers, as it is buried behind the other six sections of the Sunday Telegraph complete with their adverts for stair lifts.

Rx has 38 pages, including 5.5 pages of advertising.

* Subscribers only