We ought to take a look at the various things that contribute to the loss of vision in age-related nuclear cataracts. At the top of the list, and most obvious, is a reduction of the transparency of the lens. The prevailing medical opinion is that this is an inevitable consequence of ageing, that once the opacity has developed, little can be done except the eventual removal of the offending lens, and replacement with a prosthetic lens of one variety or another.
We commonly refer to these cataracts as "senile." The currently prevailing view is that only surgery is a reasonable course of action. I am not at all confident that this is the case. Opposition to this perspective is not strong and is also suspect because of the potential for profits generated by sales of nutritional products, vitamins and minerals. There are several large pharmaceutical companies selling vitamin-mineral products based on the results of the ARREDS study. The pills are high in price, and the claims made for them are vague and insubstantial, referring to general eye health rather than stabilization or reversal of cataracts.
One smaller company uses the audio presentation of a maverick ophthalmologist (now dead) who makes some plausible claims that give cataract sufferers enough hope to try a product with some additional ingredients to the ones indicated in the ARREDS study, but the owner of the company is not inclined to actually discuss his product in detail and deal with the actual mechanisms of action. It never impresses me when a CEO does not respond to specific questions about his product or services.
But returning to cataracts, what are some of the elements of the formation of cataracts, and which of those contributing causative factors can be reduced or reversed? Current treatment of choice is surgical. Worldwide, there is probably no more commonly performed surgery. Odds of success are high. But there are risks as well, and some of them are substantial. This is reason enough to return to the subject of prevention and delay.
From my perspective, "senile" cataracts involve more than the developing cloudiness of the lens. The ability of the lens itself to be flexed into focus is also reduced with aging. The main contributor to this is probably the ongoing thickening of the lens. The actively replicating cells of the lens are in the cortex (outermost) layer. I have, as yet, been able to find little information about the metabolic activities of the nuclear (interior) layers of the lens. Certainly those deeper lens tissues are still metabolically supported in some ways. That implies that defects in the support process play a part in the development of the loss of clarity.
We also know that these deeper cells have no direct vascular support, and that they have no nuclei and no mitochondria. But certainly there is some sort of ongoing passive fluid exchange. These lenses are quite flexible and deformable. If some sort of fluid exchange were not going on, this sort of stasis would be unlikely to go on for decades.
So assuming a certain fluid exchange, understanding that mechanism might well provide a means of altering the fluid environment of the interior of the cell in such a way as to increase the transparency of those interior cells.
Going back to the flexibility of the lens, the musculature which accomplishes the focusing of the lens is attached to the outer edge. These strands of muscle are collectively known as "Zonules of Zinn." I would like to have a deeper understanding of the interface of these muscle cells and the cells of the lens cortex.
I'm feeling my way along with this, but at the moment my emphasis is on anti-oxidants and phytochemicals, as well as various means for increasing fluid transfer in the nuclear portion of the lens. Bear in mind that these lens cells are not vascularized and contain no mitochondria, so only passive and ionic circulation of fluids can be involved.
So to sum up, I believe that it is significant that in nuclear cataracts, these characteristics are most often present; there is a direct relationship with age, there is a thickening of the lens and a corresponding reduction of efficiency of accommodation (the ability to flex the lens to resolve images), there may also be some reduction of moisture content of the lens as well. This would certainly make the lens less pliable and make it far more likely that opaque substances accumulate in the tissues.
I suspect that there is also an age-related reduction in the strength of the zonule musculature. The efficient flexure of the lens is certainly an element affecting the passive movement of fluids through the lens.
So without regard to the exact nature of the opaque inclusions in the lens, it seems reasonable to pay close attention to the level of hydration (old people have a tendency to sometimes drink too little water), to increase the intake of anti-oxidants and phytochemicals, to review the nature of the lipids in the diet, and to do a variety of lens calisthenics (changing focal distance with increased frequency).
In my particular case, I suspect that my low intake of vegetables, particularly the dark leafy ones and the yellow and orange ones, has played a role in the cataract development. This is very difficult for me to correct. I buy enough vegetables, and have all kinds of good intentions, but then often forget to eat them before they spoil. I try to make up for it by eating more fresh fruits, but I do not know how effective this substitution is.
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.
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7 comments:
Hello Anthropositor,Real good and real helpful info...just what the Doctor ordered.Thanks!
I should perhaps be thanking you Dadebreis. I stumbled on your blog quite a long time ago and drop in once in a while to see what you are doing.
I believe we have more similarities than might immediately strike the eye.
Your focus is on the Constitution and on the various ways in which it has been effectively overthrown. You are encouraging us to pay more attention and collectively to do more to prevent the further erosion of our liberties.
I got a little politically burned out a long time ago, after ten years of very vigorous and active opposition to the Vietnam War, and because our major political parties seem to have little taste for good government, and the minor parties seem too often to go to extremes or otherwise shoot themselves in the foot.
That does not mean that I have not been reading your comments and agreeing with many of them.
But one of my ongoing struggles involves property rights, eminent domain, adverse possession, official misconduct, and flelonies and misdemeanors.
And because I am now what is generally regarded as old, am two years into self-treatment for a stroke, and a year into self-treatment for a cataract, a year into self-treatment for high blood pressure (at its highest measured point, 191/110 mm Hg)but which is now back to the normal range with no medication), and a bit more than a year into my self-treatment of a dental emergency in which the quote was $2200+ to repair, I have to budget my time and set my priorities with a greater emphasis on my own survival.
I have not yet written much about this, but the fight in Riverside County, California is heating up again in such a way that I cannot ignore it. I have just had a report of new squatters who are attempting adverse possession of my property again in California. In previous attempts and in vandalism and burgaleries, the Riverside Sherrif's Department has actually aided and abetted these actions.
I hate to use words like conspiracy. But when the Eastern Municipal Water District restores water service without my authority, at the behest of a Land Management Company I have never even heard of, which had no authority to request water service on my behalf, and when the Sherrif is called out by my authorized agent to arrest the people who took possession of my land, broke into and vandalized my property, the deputy who responded allowed the squatters to remain in trespass. And even allowed them to continue bootlegging electricty with the complicity of a neighbor accross the road and a very long extension cord.
Yes, I mean it. The trespassers were just allowed to remain and prevent my agent from securing the property. The Sheriff would not even return when my agent was accosted while replacing the No Trespassing signs which had been torn down. He was unable to even board up the back door of the single remaining dwelling because of the refusal of the sheriff to come back out. They said that they had higher priorities. Apparently so.
The deputy failed to do his duty, based on the allegation of the squatters that they had my permission to be there. It was viewed by this incredibly obtuse fellow and several Watch Commanders as a landlord-tenant dispute, and that tenants have a right to proper notice and sufficient time to vacate.
The fact that these people had never met me, didn't know my name, had no rent receipts to show the existence of a Landlord-Tenant relationship was entirely lost on the Sheriff's Department. Another astonishing thing is that of all the people I talked to, most of them Watch Commanders, not a single one had ever heard of the important legal concept of Adverse Possession, a means by which your entire property may be legally stolen, because some squatter resided on it for a number of years without your knowledge or consent. The state will actually award title to your property to the squatter.
Now, it is a year later and I have just received a report from a neighbor. The Sheriff has been worse than useless. My efforts to protect my property have been obstructed by law enforcement. This is inexplicable to me. And infuriating.
More than eight years ago, a housesitter I had employed left my home vacant without notice on this same propery. (I was out of state). My home was burglarized in a very organized way. (They used a moving van and wore coveralls, unloading the place of all furniture, including even the stove and a very large upright freezer with hundreds of pounds of food.
I went almost 2000 miles to make the complaint. Riverside Sheriff's Department dispatched a Deputy who took 15 minutes to jot a few notes. There were a considerable number of clues. People who had actually seen the intruders were not even interviewed for descripions.
Weeks went by with no action. I interviewed some of the witnesses, did some other investigation on my own, and determined that the culprits were the son-in-law and daughter of the house-sitter along with other parties unknown.
I supplied the Sheriff's Dept with the information by phone. No followup of any sort occurred. The parties were never brought to justice. The son-in-law has since been to prison for other crimes and has been released and is, last I heard, living in San Diego.
Had law enforcement done its' job, I could have had some chance of restitution of my losses of about $7000. As it stands, I have no hope of recovery for what they stole.
The state compounded the crime. The County Building Code Inspectors cited me because of the vandalism that had occurred, declared the mobile home to be uninhabitable, ordered the destruction and removal of the mobile home, sent in contractors to do the job, without consent being given by me, and billed me for the many thousands of dollars they said it cost to do the job. It took years to pay the County assessment.
Bear this in mind. I am out a mobile home and perhaps $20,000 in direct losses, forced county assessments, and other expenses over the years without any of the miscreants and criminals who stole my property, trespassed and vandalized having any consequences. Even when caught in the act, they were allowed to remain in trespass, preventing my agent from trying to secure the property.
Another rude surprise I was given during that incident when the deputy refused to arrest the people or order them immediately out. According to the Watch Commanders, before they will enforce any law at all on my property, if I am not in residence, I must have a special form requesting that they do so on file in there office, AND I must renew this form with a new notarized copy every six months. They say this is the LAW. (I was unable to get them to identify the statute.) I needed to simply take their word on the matter. I do not take the word of people who lie so routinely when it suits their purposes.
Anyway, I complied. I filed the paper with them. I had no choice.
In the following six months, to my knowledge law enforcement has not been there. The paper is now expired. How did the criminals figure out it was now quite safe to reinfest my land? Did someone tell them that I didn't renew that paper because the Seriff's Department was worse than useless anyway?
Do I have any reason to believe that they will assist me in the protection of my land?
You can put this up on your blog Dadebreis if you think it will be of interest to your readers or help you with your cause. What I have described here seems to be exactly the sort of abridgement of property rights that you have so often talked about. I would be receptive to any tactical or strategic ideas that would help.
Hello,My friend.Quite a property issue you have here.I will shrilly be be looking into some of the issues you have,as they are just some of the injustices similarities, that all property owners should keep in mind.Your fist inclination should be to search the Web for assistance...maybe you have.I'm inclined to place your story on my blog somewhere...maybe in my sidebar under google Docs in a new file link subtitled as one of these:property rights, adverse possession, official misconduct or something of the sort. I have two E-Mail address,here is #2 dadebreis@yahoo.com
Actually Dadebreis, I didn't even go beck to the real beginning. Where this problem really got started goes back three decades.
There I was, minding my own business, enjoying my home, raising my kids, having a good life. Then someone donated an acre to a fundamentalist Church which set up a dope and alcohol rehabilitation "ranch" housing twenty-five to fifty male and female recovering drunks and addicts.
They had various "overseers" in charge over the years. Each overseer had his own approach and he usually lasted 3 to 6 months before being replaced by a new boss.
But they all had this in common: none of them gave the slightest thought or consideration to the neighbors.
From their perspective, only God and the overseer had any say in what happenned in their little community of dregs of the earth.
Not all of those people who were brought to the compound from several surrounding counties were successes in rehabilitation. And when they failed, or were rejected by the group for any other reason, they were not transported back to what ever neighborhood they came from.
They were kicked out the front gate with their suitcase or wad of belongings in a garbage bag, or just with empty pockets and no resources at all. Cast out on the road in the country, with no resources and with the nearest small town four miles distant.
I had never raised objection when they set it all up. After all, rehabilitation of these people is important and it has to be done somewhere. I was not one to say "not in my back yard."
They built ramshackle shacks which were not to code in any sense. As far as I know, they were never molested or cited by county building code enforcement inspectors for anything. Contrast this with the onerous penalties they have applied to me, many many thousands of dollars I had to pay for damage I had nothing to do with, and did not cause in any way.
I was forced early on to get a pit bull to protect my place in my absence. He was ultimately killed.
Even though the courts frequently released people on the condition that they participate in the program, there was no apparent court oversight or followup at all.
And the Riverside Sheriff's Department did not come out even every few days as one would expect under these conditions to keep an eye on the group. Perhaps once every two months, a squad car cruised past and were gone again for another few months.
So the group was tacitly court approved, but not officially supervised, nor put through any sort of licensing procedure, or given any sort of procedural guidelines to follow.
The group, far from being a good neighbor, applied various subtle and not so subtle pressures on me to consider donating or selling my property to them at a tiny fraction the market value, even as they were doing there utmost to reduce the market value by their very presence there.
Periodically, even after I ultimately moved out of my home there, I was contacted by people making very low offers to buy. It took very little investigation on my part to find that most of these offers were made by people in the congregation of the Church that ran the reanch accross the road.
Every couple of years someone else comes along to make a fresh try. That's the rest of the story.
Know something else? The last Watch Commander I talked to in that incident in which my agent could not even get the intruders removed or arrested when they were actually caught ON my property told me that neither the religious group or the other neighbor who was supplying electricity to them with a very long electrical cord would be investigated in any way.
Nor did law enforcement have any interest at all in the clearly illegal acts of the Eastern Municipal Water Department or the Land Management Company with which I have never, ever had any dealings with whatsoever, which somehow got the water company to turn on the water against the explicit instructions on file with them from me, not to turn on the water for anyone without my express authority.
So I am glad Dadebreis that you find this situation of interest. And I appreciate that you are putting the story up on your blog which deals with infringements on our property rights by the state. Clearly I can use all the help I can get. I hope it gets some people a little more fired up for your cause as well. We are all in this together.
And since blog readers do not always go so far as to read the comments sections, I think I will repost these comments as a fresh essay on my blog as soon as I get some minutes to spare.
Hi anthropositor,I've read ypur comments and sent you an E-Mail but no reply as yet.Hope you are you doing Oky? I pray! Here is my E-Mail address
Again.dadebreis@yahoo.com I'm hoping to here from you soon,as I wish to share your story. Your Friend JMB.
So sorry for my failure to notice your E-mail Dadebreis. I have been rather jammed up with a new discovery I'm working on. I sometimes do not check my mail often enough, and one of my E-mail addresses has a frequent glitch which makes it difficult for me to access.
But if you sent it to benson.hc@gmail.com I will read it as soon as things slow down today and get back to you right away.
I was unable to find it John. I have several hundreds in the unreads at the moment, but didn't see anything from Dadebreis or John Burns. Could it have gone astray? Or perhaps have gone to one of my century tel mailboxes which have never worked well?
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