30 1 / 2012
Hogwarts Headache
A few years ago, any cool kid who could read was suffering from Hogwarts Headache. The prestigious New England Journal of Medicine actually ran a letter from a physician noting the unfortunate side effect of children reading more, and for longer periods, than they ever had in their lives.
Yes, thanks to a couple extremely long (ostensibly children’s) books, an increasing number of parents brought their kids to the doctors with tension headaches. Since it is rare for children to suffer from chronic headaches like that, the doctors were stumped.
Then one pediatrician, Dr. Howard J. Bennett, finally realized that all three of the headache-ridden children he saw in one week were obsessively reading the newly released Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, a book that runs to over a quarter of a million words. Two of his patients refused to stop reading at their current rate, instead opting for a prescription to dull the pain. He noted that, “In all cases, the pain resolved one to two days after the patient had finished the book.”
So far there have been no reported cases of Bella Blackouts or Twilight Torpor.
[Read More: From Text Neck to Hogwarts Headache: 6 Injuries for the Modern Era]
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