This is a communication with a moderator of a forum over some recent censorship.
Hello __, hope you are well.
Justice delayed is justice denied.
No one is obligated to agree with everything I say. The free exchange of ideas is something that must be fought for on a regular basis even in free and democratic countries.
I note with dismay that even my copies of the posts on this thread have been removed from my profile. I am unable therefore to review them any longer to find the error of my ways.
I have always been a staunch supporter of Skin Cell Forum. I have told hundreds of people of the group. I am also a patriotic individual in spite of my rights sometimes being abridged by bureaucrats who have the force of law behind them... sometimes laws or policies which I have taken issue with. It is only resistance to tyranny that prevents it. It is a duty.
I am not a revolutionary who believes that the entire fabric of the social contract needs to be destroyed so that we can start fresh. Anarchy is no solution. We must improve things, not destroy everything and start fresh.
You may argue that you changed but a single word. I responded responsibly, reasonably gently, but with some vigor, entirely appropriate to the situation.
What happened next? The entire thread was removed. Why? Because it was making an addict uncomfortable with her addiction. It could well have had impact on other lurking addicts. We will never know. This particular addict is very probably beyond my help or anyone else's.
I do not fault Nick for making his comments. I applaud that. None of you have any obligation to agree with me. All of you can get on with your disagreements with me in an open forum. We will all grow in that kind of interchange. That is what the free exchange of ideas is all about.
Instead, you made my comments all disappear. And you sent a message to the addict as well. This wretched lady is in extreme distress and is bringing the greatest bulk of it on herself. She needs serious help. She does not need people feeding her Munchhausen Syndrome by giving her hugs and commiseration for ongoing and repeated failure and procrastination.
That is what most of you are doing. In most cases, a supportive attitude is a really excellent tool to help people and if you once again take a close look at my posts you will see that two thirds of them were congratulatory and extremely supportive.
What you have done here amounts to a Star Chamber Proceeding. The censorship of but a single word was responded to in a civil and appropriate way. The response was not addressed in any way.
Instead, you packed up the entire thread and locked it in a box which will never be opened again or ever see the light of day, as far as I can tell.
It is chilling __. It is wrong. What can it hurt to redact a single word? It opens the door to capriciously and dictatorially eliminating an entire quite useful thread a day or two later.
Look over those posts carefully. I tried on numerous occasions to simply withdraw. The addict herself said "No, don't do that. I came here for help." Then later she complained that my help was mean, uncompromising. You ALL enabled her to continue her addiction entirely without impediment "until she is ready." You sharply reduced her chances of success.
But worse, all the other addicts lurking and wishing to quit no longer have this reference material. You have kept the peace at considerable cost in my opinion.
It does not mean I won't be your friend or a friend to the other moderators who have joined you in this decision. It just means my friends sometimes err. So do I.
I did not make these remarks in the Rant and Rave section. I made them to you, someone who knows with certainty that I practice what I preach when it comes to censorship.
I present choices. I say "I can publish this and respond to it. Or I can simply delete it. You are the author. What do you want me to do?"
That is the only editorial latitude I employ on my blog.
Anthropositor
(I got a letter back today which assures me that the matter will not be in limbo forever... and that __ would have preferred never to have gotten involved with this controversy. So, who knows? Perhaps one day soon the thread will return to its' previous position and be unlocked so that people can decide for themselves based on the facts.)
As a later final edit, I would like to say I hold no ill will toward this moderator or the moderating team, and that even as this was being posted here, the moderator was doing the job that needed to be done and doing it pretty well I might add. Moderators are peacekeepers. I am a rather strong willed free thinker. I do shake things up now and then. I do it purposefully and in a good cause in almost all cases. (Sometimes I might get a little exasperated and go a bit further than makes everyone entirely comfortable.)
No permanent harm was done here. Good may have been done for a lot of people. Even the addict may have ultimately been helped in some way. I hope so.
About Me
- Anthropositor
- Deep South, United States
- Consultant, inventor, mentor, chess coach,. Current projects involve No Till Farming and staving off blindness due to cataracts among other projects. I also do confidential ghost writing (without taking any published credit. My current blindness makes me put this on hold for a while. I should have one eye working again in about four months. Fact, fiction, all subjects considered. I have heard My daughter Jennifer is alive. I would love it if she were to contact me here. I understand she would like to know me. I have sent a message by circuitous route. I can only hope. My posted Email works as well. We have four decades to catch up on.
Thursday, March 29, 2007
Monday, March 12, 2007
Preventing Viral Infections
HOW TO PREVENT COLDS, INFLUENZA, SARS, H5N1 (Avian Flu) AND OTHER AIRBORN VIRAL DISEASES.This same procedure also reduces the affects of airborn allergens by 50% or more.This is not a speculative idea. It has been tested since 1984. It works.
But knowing how is not the central feature. Doing it is. I started teaching the method in 1990. The earlier six years was the time of testing. Now thousands of people are successfully doing it and the numbers are going up faster each year. Do let us know your experiences with it.In 1984 when I was in my early forties, I had, many years previously, lost the lower lobe of my right lung, due to Army injuries, an early tobacco addiction, and frequent pneumonias. This resulted in bronchiactasis, a distention of the alveoli in the lungs, allowing the stagnation of mucossal secretions and developing fertile ground for infected pockets to develop in my lungs which could ultimately be life-threatening if I kept coming down with frequent colds, flu and pneumonias.
Having quit smoking during the space program back in the 1970's was very beneficial to my overall health, but my respiratory system (my weakest link) was still on the verge of killing me at any point in time that an opportunistic infection took hold.Had I not developed this prophylaxis, I would very likely have died in the 1980's.
Since then, many thousands of people have learned how to do the procedure. My calculations indicate that a much smaller number, on the order of four or five thousand people do it regularly and consistently, reaping the maximum benefit.The sad truth is that most people will not incorporate even a simple two-minute procedure into their daily hygiene routine. Even in the SARS crisis of a few years ago and with the potential for an H5N1 (avian Flu) pandemic still threatening, the numbers of people who actually get into the firm habit of doing the procedure regularly, on a daily basis, do not exceed a third of those taught. That is sad indeed.
Even the fact that THE PROCEDURE ALSO CUTS ALLERGIC RESPONSES TO AIRBORN ALLERGENS BY HALF has not increased those numbers. I did not begin teaching large numbers of people outside my circle of family and friends until 1990. By the mid-nineties, I had heard from a great many allergy-prone individuals, of this serendipitous side-effect. What a pleasant surprise!But now, without further preamble, here is what you do:
While in the shower, take a couple of Q-tip style cotton swabs, saturated with (nothing but) clear warm water. NO SOAP OR ANY OTHER LOTION ON THE SWABS. Swab the nasal passages as high as you can comfortably reach. Do this gently but be thorough. I rinse the swabs perhaps a half dozen times during this swabbing. The purpose here is to clean out the great bulk of the detritus. You are only going up perhaps an inch or an inch and a quarter on each side. You are not trying to reach the brain-pan with the swabs. If the swabs won't go so far up, not to worry. It's going to work anyway. Now, most of the accumulation of debris and the populations of the indigenous organisms in the nasal passages have been largely eliminated. This was step 1.
After drying off, lay down on the bed with some fresh cooking oil of your choice and some fresh new swabs. You can use corn oil or safflower or rapeseed (canola) or olive oil. If you are allergic to peanut oil, DON'T use peanut oil. We have been talking about coconut oil. I had never used it, assuming that it had a strong coconut smell. I was not correct. Coconut oil is now at the top of the list of approved oils for this procedure. But there is good reason not to use other more highly aromatic oils.
There are two separate olfactory apparati working in the nose. Our ordinary sense of smell, which we are all familiar with. The other sense, which most of us never become consciously aware of, is governed by the vomeronasal organ. The function of this organ is sensing special aromas, pheremonal in nature. These scents are delivered to entirely different areas of the brain than the other smells we perceive. It is important not to interfere with the functions of this organ since it is so closely associated with our instincts, and subtle social behaviors, and we don't want to mess up the various elements involved. The procedure outlined here does not adversely impact the function of the vomeronasal system.
In any case, you are now laying on your back on the bed, have dipped the swabs in the vegetable oil of your choice, and are now swabbing your nasal passages just as far as you did with the water swabs when you were in the shower. You are now coating the nasal membrane, which has already been moisturized with the only real moisturizer there is. Water. You have now covered this pre-moistened surface with an oil sheen which will help prevent the moisture from being evaporated away by the cold desiccated air in the same way that chap stick prevents your lips from chapping.
Let's look at the nasal membrane with a little flashlight... Notice how red it is, particularly that portion which is hardest to observe, the narrow channel just below the bridge of the nose. It is even brighter red than the surrounding areas of nasal membrane. It is such a bright red because you are seeing the blood through the membrane. This is where the viruses most often make their illegal entry into your bloodstream.
Notice also the little cilia-like hairs which are so effective as filters of the larger particles in the air we breathe.I usually tell people that it is not generally a good idea to snort anything back further in the nasal passage. This is an exception to that. Your nose has been pretty thoroughly cleaned. It is still far from sterile, but the jungle of organisms are mostly gone. You have now coated the moist membrane and the tiny hairs with the oil, but if the oil gets up a bit further than the swabs have reached, so much the better.
What time of year do respiratory viruses occur? During colder, more variable weather. Those times when your lips are likely to chap. Why do your lips chap? You are frequently going into cold exterior environments with very dry desiccated air, contrasting from the moist interior environments. We do this often during the fall and winter. We notice the chapping of our lips because we flex them continuously by talking, and the cracks which develop are very large because of the flexing. The same thing is happening to the nasal membrane. The fissures are, by comparison to the lips, microscopic. Even so, to a virus particle, these membrane fissures are like the Grand Canyon.
VIRUSES CANNOT REPLICATE IF THEY DO NOT FIRST MAKE ENTRY INTO THE BLOODSTREAM, INVADE OUR INDIVIDUAL CELLS, SET UP THE CELLULAR MANUFACTURING APPARATUS WITH THE VIRAL BLUEPRINT AND TURN THE PLACE INTO A VIRAL FACTORY.
OK let's review:
Step 1. Cleanse the nasal passages with swabs saturated with clear, fresh water.
Step 2. Lay on the bed and swab passages with vegetable oil. NOT Vaseline, NOT mineral oil, NOT 10-30 Motor oil, NOT glycerin, NOT dimethylpolysiloxane. JUST VEGETABLE OIL that you are not allergic to.
Step 3. Wipe your nose. That is to say, remove the excess oil from the eighth inch or so of the vestibular area of the nasal passage until no more oil is coming out.
Step 4. Congratulate yourself for remembering to do it every day.
Step 5. If you have health care providers, show them this. Tell them you are doing it. Answer any questions they might have or refer them to me for any further clarification that might be required.
Step 6. Carefully teach others how to do it or let them read this.
Step 7. There is no step seven.
One final thing. When to do it. Do it every day that you are going to be exposed to other people. Do it before you go out into the world. Not before you go to bed at night.
For allergic responses, do it before you are going to be exposed to high concentrations of allergens, like vacuuming the carpets, mowing the weeds or raking the leaves. The allergic responses will be abated by more than half in severity, thus reducing sharply the medications you need. Respiratory viral disease will be eliminated in terms of symptomatically apparent disease. You are not living in a bubble or scrubbing your hands every 10 minutes or refusing to shake hands like Howard Hughes. You are just living a much healthier life.
Continue to do the other prudent things like washing your hands, getting proper nutrition and adequate rest.Please do it for yourselves and let us know here how it worked out for you. To your health!
(This will return to the top of the pile every few months. Who reads archives?)
But knowing how is not the central feature. Doing it is. I started teaching the method in 1990. The earlier six years was the time of testing. Now thousands of people are successfully doing it and the numbers are going up faster each year. Do let us know your experiences with it.In 1984 when I was in my early forties, I had, many years previously, lost the lower lobe of my right lung, due to Army injuries, an early tobacco addiction, and frequent pneumonias. This resulted in bronchiactasis, a distention of the alveoli in the lungs, allowing the stagnation of mucossal secretions and developing fertile ground for infected pockets to develop in my lungs which could ultimately be life-threatening if I kept coming down with frequent colds, flu and pneumonias.
Having quit smoking during the space program back in the 1970's was very beneficial to my overall health, but my respiratory system (my weakest link) was still on the verge of killing me at any point in time that an opportunistic infection took hold.Had I not developed this prophylaxis, I would very likely have died in the 1980's.
Since then, many thousands of people have learned how to do the procedure. My calculations indicate that a much smaller number, on the order of four or five thousand people do it regularly and consistently, reaping the maximum benefit.The sad truth is that most people will not incorporate even a simple two-minute procedure into their daily hygiene routine. Even in the SARS crisis of a few years ago and with the potential for an H5N1 (avian Flu) pandemic still threatening, the numbers of people who actually get into the firm habit of doing the procedure regularly, on a daily basis, do not exceed a third of those taught. That is sad indeed.
Even the fact that THE PROCEDURE ALSO CUTS ALLERGIC RESPONSES TO AIRBORN ALLERGENS BY HALF has not increased those numbers. I did not begin teaching large numbers of people outside my circle of family and friends until 1990. By the mid-nineties, I had heard from a great many allergy-prone individuals, of this serendipitous side-effect. What a pleasant surprise!But now, without further preamble, here is what you do:
While in the shower, take a couple of Q-tip style cotton swabs, saturated with (nothing but) clear warm water. NO SOAP OR ANY OTHER LOTION ON THE SWABS. Swab the nasal passages as high as you can comfortably reach. Do this gently but be thorough. I rinse the swabs perhaps a half dozen times during this swabbing. The purpose here is to clean out the great bulk of the detritus. You are only going up perhaps an inch or an inch and a quarter on each side. You are not trying to reach the brain-pan with the swabs. If the swabs won't go so far up, not to worry. It's going to work anyway. Now, most of the accumulation of debris and the populations of the indigenous organisms in the nasal passages have been largely eliminated. This was step 1.
After drying off, lay down on the bed with some fresh cooking oil of your choice and some fresh new swabs. You can use corn oil or safflower or rapeseed (canola) or olive oil. If you are allergic to peanut oil, DON'T use peanut oil. We have been talking about coconut oil. I had never used it, assuming that it had a strong coconut smell. I was not correct. Coconut oil is now at the top of the list of approved oils for this procedure. But there is good reason not to use other more highly aromatic oils.
There are two separate olfactory apparati working in the nose. Our ordinary sense of smell, which we are all familiar with. The other sense, which most of us never become consciously aware of, is governed by the vomeronasal organ. The function of this organ is sensing special aromas, pheremonal in nature. These scents are delivered to entirely different areas of the brain than the other smells we perceive. It is important not to interfere with the functions of this organ since it is so closely associated with our instincts, and subtle social behaviors, and we don't want to mess up the various elements involved. The procedure outlined here does not adversely impact the function of the vomeronasal system.
In any case, you are now laying on your back on the bed, have dipped the swabs in the vegetable oil of your choice, and are now swabbing your nasal passages just as far as you did with the water swabs when you were in the shower. You are now coating the nasal membrane, which has already been moisturized with the only real moisturizer there is. Water. You have now covered this pre-moistened surface with an oil sheen which will help prevent the moisture from being evaporated away by the cold desiccated air in the same way that chap stick prevents your lips from chapping.
Let's look at the nasal membrane with a little flashlight... Notice how red it is, particularly that portion which is hardest to observe, the narrow channel just below the bridge of the nose. It is even brighter red than the surrounding areas of nasal membrane. It is such a bright red because you are seeing the blood through the membrane. This is where the viruses most often make their illegal entry into your bloodstream.
Notice also the little cilia-like hairs which are so effective as filters of the larger particles in the air we breathe.I usually tell people that it is not generally a good idea to snort anything back further in the nasal passage. This is an exception to that. Your nose has been pretty thoroughly cleaned. It is still far from sterile, but the jungle of organisms are mostly gone. You have now coated the moist membrane and the tiny hairs with the oil, but if the oil gets up a bit further than the swabs have reached, so much the better.
What time of year do respiratory viruses occur? During colder, more variable weather. Those times when your lips are likely to chap. Why do your lips chap? You are frequently going into cold exterior environments with very dry desiccated air, contrasting from the moist interior environments. We do this often during the fall and winter. We notice the chapping of our lips because we flex them continuously by talking, and the cracks which develop are very large because of the flexing. The same thing is happening to the nasal membrane. The fissures are, by comparison to the lips, microscopic. Even so, to a virus particle, these membrane fissures are like the Grand Canyon.
VIRUSES CANNOT REPLICATE IF THEY DO NOT FIRST MAKE ENTRY INTO THE BLOODSTREAM, INVADE OUR INDIVIDUAL CELLS, SET UP THE CELLULAR MANUFACTURING APPARATUS WITH THE VIRAL BLUEPRINT AND TURN THE PLACE INTO A VIRAL FACTORY.
OK let's review:
Step 1. Cleanse the nasal passages with swabs saturated with clear, fresh water.
Step 2. Lay on the bed and swab passages with vegetable oil. NOT Vaseline, NOT mineral oil, NOT 10-30 Motor oil, NOT glycerin, NOT dimethylpolysiloxane. JUST VEGETABLE OIL that you are not allergic to.
Step 3. Wipe your nose. That is to say, remove the excess oil from the eighth inch or so of the vestibular area of the nasal passage until no more oil is coming out.
Step 4. Congratulate yourself for remembering to do it every day.
Step 5. If you have health care providers, show them this. Tell them you are doing it. Answer any questions they might have or refer them to me for any further clarification that might be required.
Step 6. Carefully teach others how to do it or let them read this.
Step 7. There is no step seven.
One final thing. When to do it. Do it every day that you are going to be exposed to other people. Do it before you go out into the world. Not before you go to bed at night.
For allergic responses, do it before you are going to be exposed to high concentrations of allergens, like vacuuming the carpets, mowing the weeds or raking the leaves. The allergic responses will be abated by more than half in severity, thus reducing sharply the medications you need. Respiratory viral disease will be eliminated in terms of symptomatically apparent disease. You are not living in a bubble or scrubbing your hands every 10 minutes or refusing to shake hands like Howard Hughes. You are just living a much healthier life.
Continue to do the other prudent things like washing your hands, getting proper nutrition and adequate rest.Please do it for yourselves and let us know here how it worked out for you. To your health!
(This will return to the top of the pile every few months. Who reads archives?)
Saturday, March 10, 2007
A Letter To the Eye Surgeon
Dear Dr. B____,
We have known each other for perhaps twenty minutes total. Half exam and half short orientation. Three different technicians took ultrasound readings of the axial length of my eye because of conflicting results. Since the ultimate success of the surgery depends in part on the accuracy of these readings, I can only hope that the conflicting figures have not been averaged, which would of course incorporate error into the measurement.
I have looked at some of the less agreeable outcomes that some patients have reported (with other doctors). Some of them were due to unfortunate and perhaps unforeseeable complications. Others were perhaps caused by institutional, assembly-line practices.
But I kept noticing that many of these stories had a large factor in common. The patients themselves remained pretty oblivious about the details. They didn’t know what was happening and pretty much left all the details up to the doctor, just having hope and faith that everything was going to come out all right. I suppose that it is convenient for the various professionals and institutions involved, because most patients are not really well equipped to sort out many of the details, but such ignorance has to play a role in the results. I do not intend to be a party to anything going amiss here.
I did not have the opportunity to see the orientation videotape because the player was broken. I elected not to make another 140 mile roundtrip to see it. But I am not just leaving things up to fate. I am learning whatever I can even in our short time frame. Surgery is scheduled in two weeks. I will make sense of each enigma or potential problem that might arise before then, or we will reschedule if necessary.
Two things struck me about the sample implant that you showed me. It was very small in diameter, nowhere near the size of the clouded lens you are removing. This led me to wonder about the scattered unfocused light entering the eye around the smaller periphery of this lens and what effect that might have on such things as glare in night-vision after the procedure. And even though most lenses today filter the UV light that goes through them, what about the unfocused UV light that gets in around this smaller lens edge? It strikes me that scattered light could be playing a part in difficulties such as glare in night vision.
I presume that the central reason for the small size of the lens is the reduction of the size of the incision required for insertion. I am certainly in favor of that. But glare and haloes still seem to be quite a significant problem for some people and no one seems to know exactly why.
Another thing that I noticed is that there were two haptics, attached at 180 degree points of the model you showed me. This was counter-intuitive for me. From a stability standpoint, I would have thought that three haptics or even four would have been the number. I am also interested in knowing more about the interface between the haptics and the lens and how exactly the haptics anchor to the zonules and other tissues at the edge of the capsular cavity within the eye and what sort of changes occur in the tissue to accommodate the points of the haptics.
You mentioned the possibility of a secondary cataract developing after surgery which might need to be addressed later. If memory serves, you indicated a high probability that this would occur.
What we are dealing with now is a nuclear cataract of the lens itself. What we may have to deal with later would be a “posterior sub capsular “ cataract which develops frequently as a postoperative complication after the correction of the original problem, but can wind up being just as severe as the original. Do I understand that correctly?
The question occurs to me: Is there some clinically significant reason that the YAG laser procedure to correct this condition later, could not be done at the time of the original cataract surgery to prevent the problem from developing? It strikes me that you are already in the eye and removing the debris of the disintegrated lens. The debris of the laser procedure is also a consideration. But apparently the YAG lasering is usually done when there is no surgical procedure underway and therefore the resulting debris remains. Would it not be wise to do it when you are already in there slurping up the lens? This would certainly reduce the likelihood of this very common secondary cataract complication.
Another potential complication you touched upon had to do with the implant falling through a rupture in the posterior membrane and coming to rest on the retina. If memory serves, another specialist would quickly be called in to deal with this quite dangerous problem.
Indulge me for a moment while I brainstorm. Perhaps not too much can be done to prevent it but would it not make good sense if such a rupture were to occur, to prevent the lens from dropping through all the way down to the retina? It strikes me that such a falling lens must float down through a gel-like vitreous fluid until it reaches the retinal plane and comes to rest. I do not know how much time elapses, but it is not instantaneous. My guess is it takes ten seconds or more, and that the very worst spot for this fallen lens to come to rest is on the macula or on the fovea.
It also appears that the “natural” or “usual” or “conventional” or “accepted” position of the head during this operation is for the head to be pointing directly face up, placing the macula gravitationally directly under where the lens will fall if it breaks through the membrane. If there is even a short time between breaking through the membrane and the lens coming to rest, would it not be prudent to immediately reposition the patients head so that the lens would be more likely to come to rest in a peripheral area of the interior of the eyeball rather than the retinal surface?
You mentioned a brand or two and some materials which I did not write down or remember. We did not go into any detail about the actual structure of the lens, so I am going to take that up from the perspective of what would appear to have the greatest potential for success in my situation from my current perspective of limited knowledge.
If I refer to one particular brand or other, I do not mean to imply that I have “locked on” to that brand or even that it will be my preference when all facts are in. It just means that it seems from my perspective to have a lot of favorable things going for it. It is, after all, the critical component.
Another consideration is the corrective design of the intraocular lens. I am already monocular by habit and inclination, so I could easily live with it if the correction was very good at one extreme but less than perfect at the other. But lenses have improved markedly in the past few decades. I see no reason not to employ these improvements if possible. Both distant and close-up vision are important to me.
As I understand it, the choices I have are as follows. A single vision lens. A “bifocal” lens. A multi-focal lens. I am interested in a multi-focal accommodating lens.
I am interested in blue-blocking UV filtering as well.
Could you tell me more about the lenses that you currently use which meet these criteria?
As to stitches. Are they usually used in this operation? What is the usual length of the incision? If stitches are involved, are they self absorbing or do they need to be removed later?
Now as to anesthesia. I don’t recall our discussing it. It is my understanding that these operations can be done with topical anesthetic drops or with injections, which carry substantial additional risks, along with making the eyeball more fixed in position during the operation. What will be the game plan in this case?
And last, The manufacturer and the model and type of the lens in prospect may be of some interest from a financial standpoint. Some of the newer multi-focal accommodating lenses are not fully covered by insurers. Others are. I want to be sure that I am on the same page as my insurance provider before the operation.
Oh, and thank you for going out of your comfort zone on that prescription. I know I took you out of your specialty. You dealt with it and double checked what you were doing. That's one of the things I want in a doctor.
Cordially,
H.C.Benson
We have known each other for perhaps twenty minutes total. Half exam and half short orientation. Three different technicians took ultrasound readings of the axial length of my eye because of conflicting results. Since the ultimate success of the surgery depends in part on the accuracy of these readings, I can only hope that the conflicting figures have not been averaged, which would of course incorporate error into the measurement.
I have looked at some of the less agreeable outcomes that some patients have reported (with other doctors). Some of them were due to unfortunate and perhaps unforeseeable complications. Others were perhaps caused by institutional, assembly-line practices.
But I kept noticing that many of these stories had a large factor in common. The patients themselves remained pretty oblivious about the details. They didn’t know what was happening and pretty much left all the details up to the doctor, just having hope and faith that everything was going to come out all right. I suppose that it is convenient for the various professionals and institutions involved, because most patients are not really well equipped to sort out many of the details, but such ignorance has to play a role in the results. I do not intend to be a party to anything going amiss here.
I did not have the opportunity to see the orientation videotape because the player was broken. I elected not to make another 140 mile roundtrip to see it. But I am not just leaving things up to fate. I am learning whatever I can even in our short time frame. Surgery is scheduled in two weeks. I will make sense of each enigma or potential problem that might arise before then, or we will reschedule if necessary.
Two things struck me about the sample implant that you showed me. It was very small in diameter, nowhere near the size of the clouded lens you are removing. This led me to wonder about the scattered unfocused light entering the eye around the smaller periphery of this lens and what effect that might have on such things as glare in night-vision after the procedure. And even though most lenses today filter the UV light that goes through them, what about the unfocused UV light that gets in around this smaller lens edge? It strikes me that scattered light could be playing a part in difficulties such as glare in night vision.
I presume that the central reason for the small size of the lens is the reduction of the size of the incision required for insertion. I am certainly in favor of that. But glare and haloes still seem to be quite a significant problem for some people and no one seems to know exactly why.
Another thing that I noticed is that there were two haptics, attached at 180 degree points of the model you showed me. This was counter-intuitive for me. From a stability standpoint, I would have thought that three haptics or even four would have been the number. I am also interested in knowing more about the interface between the haptics and the lens and how exactly the haptics anchor to the zonules and other tissues at the edge of the capsular cavity within the eye and what sort of changes occur in the tissue to accommodate the points of the haptics.
You mentioned the possibility of a secondary cataract developing after surgery which might need to be addressed later. If memory serves, you indicated a high probability that this would occur.
What we are dealing with now is a nuclear cataract of the lens itself. What we may have to deal with later would be a “posterior sub capsular “ cataract which develops frequently as a postoperative complication after the correction of the original problem, but can wind up being just as severe as the original. Do I understand that correctly?
The question occurs to me: Is there some clinically significant reason that the YAG laser procedure to correct this condition later, could not be done at the time of the original cataract surgery to prevent the problem from developing? It strikes me that you are already in the eye and removing the debris of the disintegrated lens. The debris of the laser procedure is also a consideration. But apparently the YAG lasering is usually done when there is no surgical procedure underway and therefore the resulting debris remains. Would it not be wise to do it when you are already in there slurping up the lens? This would certainly reduce the likelihood of this very common secondary cataract complication.
Another potential complication you touched upon had to do with the implant falling through a rupture in the posterior membrane and coming to rest on the retina. If memory serves, another specialist would quickly be called in to deal with this quite dangerous problem.
Indulge me for a moment while I brainstorm. Perhaps not too much can be done to prevent it but would it not make good sense if such a rupture were to occur, to prevent the lens from dropping through all the way down to the retina? It strikes me that such a falling lens must float down through a gel-like vitreous fluid until it reaches the retinal plane and comes to rest. I do not know how much time elapses, but it is not instantaneous. My guess is it takes ten seconds or more, and that the very worst spot for this fallen lens to come to rest is on the macula or on the fovea.
It also appears that the “natural” or “usual” or “conventional” or “accepted” position of the head during this operation is for the head to be pointing directly face up, placing the macula gravitationally directly under where the lens will fall if it breaks through the membrane. If there is even a short time between breaking through the membrane and the lens coming to rest, would it not be prudent to immediately reposition the patients head so that the lens would be more likely to come to rest in a peripheral area of the interior of the eyeball rather than the retinal surface?
You mentioned a brand or two and some materials which I did not write down or remember. We did not go into any detail about the actual structure of the lens, so I am going to take that up from the perspective of what would appear to have the greatest potential for success in my situation from my current perspective of limited knowledge.
If I refer to one particular brand or other, I do not mean to imply that I have “locked on” to that brand or even that it will be my preference when all facts are in. It just means that it seems from my perspective to have a lot of favorable things going for it. It is, after all, the critical component.
Another consideration is the corrective design of the intraocular lens. I am already monocular by habit and inclination, so I could easily live with it if the correction was very good at one extreme but less than perfect at the other. But lenses have improved markedly in the past few decades. I see no reason not to employ these improvements if possible. Both distant and close-up vision are important to me.
As I understand it, the choices I have are as follows. A single vision lens. A “bifocal” lens. A multi-focal lens. I am interested in a multi-focal accommodating lens.
I am interested in blue-blocking UV filtering as well.
Could you tell me more about the lenses that you currently use which meet these criteria?
As to stitches. Are they usually used in this operation? What is the usual length of the incision? If stitches are involved, are they self absorbing or do they need to be removed later?
Now as to anesthesia. I don’t recall our discussing it. It is my understanding that these operations can be done with topical anesthetic drops or with injections, which carry substantial additional risks, along with making the eyeball more fixed in position during the operation. What will be the game plan in this case?
And last, The manufacturer and the model and type of the lens in prospect may be of some interest from a financial standpoint. Some of the newer multi-focal accommodating lenses are not fully covered by insurers. Others are. I want to be sure that I am on the same page as my insurance provider before the operation.
Oh, and thank you for going out of your comfort zone on that prescription. I know I took you out of your specialty. You dealt with it and double checked what you were doing. That's one of the things I want in a doctor.
Cordially,
H.C.Benson
Friday, March 02, 2007
Heresy?
When a missionary goes into a primitive land with the backward natives and the daily challenges for survival, he may be quite proud of himself for having taken on the task of bringing the true faith to the ignorant heathen. More souls for the Lord. Of course, I speak of Christian missionaries but the principles apply with all religions and with political and nationalistic or fanatical terrorist groups as well.
These diverse groups of highly committed people have some things in common. They are “true believers” whatever their religious, political, scientific or revolutionary orientation. They may spend considerable time and effort learning the native tongue . This gives the impression that they are acquiring the linguistic skills to become further oriented to the “primitive” community, and developing a better notion of the native society. Although a certain amount of this learning occurs, It does not appear to be the central purpose of learning the language.
The real reason seems to be to better impart the new dogma to the backward savages. The missionary may learn that the naive native believes that the mountain god brings the blessed rain to the jungle. The missionary , without reflection, just knows that this notion is nonsense. He doesn’t even stop to consider it. He is too busy trying to couch scriptures in the native tongue.
And yet, it does not take much thought to realize that mountains impose a barrier to wind, causing updrafts which carry moisture laden clouds high where they will cool and drop the moisture that they contained in the form of rain. So the native “superstition” which seemed so quaint to the missionary held some nuggets of good sense.
It is hard for me to be too hard on the missionaries though, since I recognize that although I am a heretic (some have said a damnable heresiarch) I do advocate a certain open-mindedness with regard to science, philosophy and religion, and sometimes do so with considerable zeal.
One of the reasons missionaries go to strange lands to convert the primitives is that it is so practical. It works so well. They DO achieve significant numbers of converts. The primitives are at a considerable disadvantage, economically, educationally, socially. They are generally second-class in their own minds, and in the missionary’s mind, though he would rarely admit it.
This is what Sunday School is all about as well. Taking advantage of a helpless, powerless and comparatively inexperienced and credulous captive audience; using exceedingly powerful propaganda tools to persuade the little tykes before they are able to defend themselves with any sophistication at all. Young children should not be programmed with religious dogma in the absence of other balancing ideas. We are hardly conscious of this insidious missionary behavior, taking place in our churches continuously. We should be much more conscious of this kind of conditioning.
On the other side of the world in a whole slew of different countries Maddrassa schools do precisely the same sort of conditioning of millions of children who are not able to separate dogma and political propaganda from fact. We have ignored this terroristic tool for decades. Even our allies in the region have these schools operating in large numbers. A rather intractable problem. Any ideas?
These diverse groups of highly committed people have some things in common. They are “true believers” whatever their religious, political, scientific or revolutionary orientation. They may spend considerable time and effort learning the native tongue . This gives the impression that they are acquiring the linguistic skills to become further oriented to the “primitive” community, and developing a better notion of the native society. Although a certain amount of this learning occurs, It does not appear to be the central purpose of learning the language.
The real reason seems to be to better impart the new dogma to the backward savages. The missionary may learn that the naive native believes that the mountain god brings the blessed rain to the jungle. The missionary , without reflection, just knows that this notion is nonsense. He doesn’t even stop to consider it. He is too busy trying to couch scriptures in the native tongue.
And yet, it does not take much thought to realize that mountains impose a barrier to wind, causing updrafts which carry moisture laden clouds high where they will cool and drop the moisture that they contained in the form of rain. So the native “superstition” which seemed so quaint to the missionary held some nuggets of good sense.
It is hard for me to be too hard on the missionaries though, since I recognize that although I am a heretic (some have said a damnable heresiarch) I do advocate a certain open-mindedness with regard to science, philosophy and religion, and sometimes do so with considerable zeal.
One of the reasons missionaries go to strange lands to convert the primitives is that it is so practical. It works so well. They DO achieve significant numbers of converts. The primitives are at a considerable disadvantage, economically, educationally, socially. They are generally second-class in their own minds, and in the missionary’s mind, though he would rarely admit it.
This is what Sunday School is all about as well. Taking advantage of a helpless, powerless and comparatively inexperienced and credulous captive audience; using exceedingly powerful propaganda tools to persuade the little tykes before they are able to defend themselves with any sophistication at all. Young children should not be programmed with religious dogma in the absence of other balancing ideas. We are hardly conscious of this insidious missionary behavior, taking place in our churches continuously. We should be much more conscious of this kind of conditioning.
On the other side of the world in a whole slew of different countries Maddrassa schools do precisely the same sort of conditioning of millions of children who are not able to separate dogma and political propaganda from fact. We have ignored this terroristic tool for decades. Even our allies in the region have these schools operating in large numbers. A rather intractable problem. Any ideas?
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