Cataract Correction Part one.

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.

Trolling the Blogs

I have been trying to sort out why I randomly surf the blogs. Often I am looking for specific information about a given subject like cataracts or virology or nutrition or chemistry or physics. Surfing the blogs is of no help in that regard. So the question of why I spend a few hours a week looking over chance blogs still remains unanswered, when I could be using search engines in a more focused and directed way.

I guess it has to be the novelty and element of occasional surprise. You just really never know where you are going to wind up. Yesterday I came upon a blog about spanking. Having been spanked frequently and very hard as a young child, it is not a subject which I take to with great enthusiasm. My sons got very few spankings. Even fewer were hard. And each of those give me lasting regret.

So it was a surprise to see this particular blog, which was extolling a variety of benefits to adults spanking adults. There wer a considerable number of pictures. There are even professional spankers who perform for a fee. Apparently there is a significant subculture who engage in the practice. Contrary to what I would have guessed, I don't recall more than a picture or two of women being the recipient. Most were of women administering the spanking to their spouse or boyfriend.

But I think what surprised me the most is how many comments were made on the postings, how favorable virtually all the posts were about the practice, and how basically happy the people involved were with the activity.

A few years ago I saw a movie which rather disturbed and impressed me. It was called "The Secretary" with Maggie Gyllenthaal and James Spader. When I rented the movie, it was on the basis of the stars, not the plot blurb. So I had no idea of the content having elements of sado-masochism. The oddest thing of all is that it was such a happy movie. I went from my initial reaction that this was a disturbed and troubling relationship, to what a happy couple.

Anyway, I thought I would get away from my practice of dealing with things like cataracts, which according to the experts will affect virtually all of us if we survive long enough, but about which practically none of us have any real interest. The same with prevention of viral infections, which affect almost everyone almost every year. Yet these and other scientific subjects of importance to our comfort and survival, do not inspire much interest in the general public.

The other day, one of my chess opponents said that he had taken a look at my blog. He said I talked about too many subjects and used too many words. I had to chuckle over that.

There is some validity to the using too many words criticism. Hemingway believed in brevity, and achieved it in spades with "The Old Man and the Sea." But as his career went on, he found such perfect brevity very elusive. I have a feeling that this might have played some part in his ultimate demise. Writers perhaps take their craft too seriously.

But the other thing that came to mind was what a regent once said to Mozart when straining to find some intelligent critical comment to Mozart about a piece of his music that had just been performed.

"Too many notes." he said.

Posted on Another Blog, "After Gutenberg"

I stumbled upon "After Gutenberg" this afternoon. I have so far found the various entries informative and thought provoking. This is my reaction to less than 1% of the blogs I view.

Focus is as important as creativity and imagination in the generation of new concepts and techniques in dealing with problems. My central focus at the moment is supposed to be on reversal of cataracts by the application of better surgical procedures, or by the prevention/reversal of cataracts by nonsurgical means. Instead, I found myself taking the tour of some of the wealth of ideas I found here in other areas.

But I noticed that some of the very same impediments to progress in solving many problems that I have seen described here, have some of the same characteristics that I have encountered in trying to gain the interest and attention of the central players in the eye-care industry, ophthalmologists.

Only a few years ago, I was lamenting the short sighted perspectives of the associated industries (big oil and big auto) in downplaying the complex problems of global warming, population pressure and uncoordinated, unsustainable water policies.

But it is clear that the special interests involved in slowing the potential progress that could be made, have not really made an intrinsic change in course. They have made virtually no actual changes in policy or emphasis. Only cosmetic ones designed to maintain the profit status quo in the present, lulling us into a sense of complacency, no matter what the consequences in the future.

Now, I must admit that I have not used "meta tags" and other means of attracting attention to eurekaideasunlimited.blogspot.com
I think in the past half year it has only received about 2000 hits. And from those hits, there has been a miniscule handful of thoughtful and relevant responses. I really did want to see that good ideas would provide their own attraction and it would be self-sustaining. Clearly that is not the case.

This blog, After Gutenberg, seems to be suffering from the same sort of problem, although clearly, it is polished, and uses skills and techniques which I have not yet employed, and has been around for a number of years.

In cataracts, the vested interests are different. They are the Ophthalmologists, the industry that produces the equipment and IOL's, and the medical installations that profit by the operations. They have considerable incentive to maintain the status quo, and to provide even more expensive services. (To use an accomodating multifocal lens will cost more than $2000 on top of the basic surgical fees.) There is no incentive for any ophthalmologist to buck this trend, particularly if the new innovation(s) delay surgery for an appreciable time, or even eliminate it entirely in many cases. The doctors are making too much money to rock the boat.

Now our corn farmers are very much in favor of producing ethanol. It makes the crop more valuable. But is it a wise course to be thinking of using the central staple grain in our food chain? The corn farmer thinks it's a wonderful idea. He is a special interest, and one who has sometimes gotten a raw deal in the marketplace.

But step back and see the bigger picture. With massive amounts of corn diverted to ethanol production, pet food, livestock feed, and the chickens, turkeys and beef and pork for which corn is an essential feed component,not to mention the ubiquitous corn sweetener business will also increase in product cost.

What is the solution? The truth is that cellulosic production of ethanol will work just fine. In otherwords, we need not depend on corn or any other food crop for energy production. We can use sawdust, plant stalks, lawn clippings, weeds and brush. Why on earth would we use food to make alcohol? It just makes no sense at all if you are not one of the vested interests for whom it affects the bottom line.

Getting Better

One of my friends supplied me with somelinks that in essence said I was barking up a wrong tree. The links were useful in a variety of ways and I appreciated them, but still had some caveats. This was my response:

Hello Bunnie, These links are interesting and useful. I notice, though that the first link only devotes a paragraph to the lens. The other major components of the eye get much more attention.

I think this is a significant indicator of the mindset that prevails in the cataract removal industry. And it is not just this link that does this. You can get a lot more detail about every other significant eye part, with a lot less hunting.

Could this be because it is the only "routine" for cataracts, to just "amputate" the lens and insert a prosthetic lens? If it is going to just be chopped out and replaced, there is little to be gained by knowing a lot about it's structure.

And one of the other links calls it a "myth" that interventions such as eyedrops or nutritional supplements or dietary changes, or for that matter, any intervention at all, short of surgery will do any good at all.

To me the word myth is quite a strong one. I do not think it applies when it simply has not been established that the variety of other interventions are of incontrovertable value.

Without opening another can of worms in another branch of surgical intervention, cardiology, findings were recently published that perhaps half of one variety of procedure were next to useless or completely useless. This procedure has been done hundreds of thousands of times every year in the Unites States alone. I doubt that refunds will be offerred.

Getting back to cataracts, a number of months ago, I was attempting to use some nonsurgical interventions to at least stabilize or perhaps reverse the effects of a cataract on vision. After several weeks, I couldn't see any obvious improvement. I was doing several different things at the same time. When I didn't see evidence of improvement over a period of a month or so, I became less and less interested in continuing. But in retrospect, I do not really think I gave the things I was doing enough of a trial.

The cataract took years and years to develop, without my even noticing it until it was pretty well advanced. So the deterioration from month to month was exceedingly subtle. Not only that, I had not calibrated a measurement system, with which I could make a baseline measurement which would later help me to assess changes. I set about doing that.

Furthermore, I wanted to produce a device with which I could assess some of the glare affects of the cataract on night vision with some precision. So I set about doing that as well. That is pretty technical and hard to discuss, so I will leave the glare issue aside.

So let us look at both clarity of vision and the ability to percieve different colors. I additionally decided that it was better to have a measurement that used images produced by emitted light rather than reflected light. So a TV screen or a computer screen were the obvious choices. But of course, one can't easily control what is going to occur on the TV screen and repeatability, to be able to replicate with great precision, the image that was going to be used for the testing purposes was absolutely essential.

So I began casting about for an image on the computer screen which I could reliably replicate at will, which would be absolutely replicatible down to the finest detail every time I wanted it, which also included a variety of colors and sizes of print, highly contrasting from the background.
When I first turn on the computer, I get a blue screen. It is replaced by the Windows XP symbol and lettering on a black screen which is too large for my purposes and quickly spontaneously disappears as the computer finishes booting up.

But later on, if I get distracted by anything, and do nothing with the computer or touch the mouse, a much smaller version of this logo becomes a screensaver, with three very different sizes of white lettering on a black background "Windows" the largest, with an orange XP; underneath that, "Home Edition" in medium print, and the smallest, above windows, "Microsoft."
Now I needed to make a precise distance measurement. One which would allow me to see the large and the medium copy pretty well, but would only allow me to nearly resolve the smallest word. Measuring from my forhead to the screen with a seven inch spacer, I was able to easily read Windows XP and Home Edition, but Microsoft was just a blur in which I could resove none of the letters clearly. The M looked to me more like a V. The ft at the other end, I could make out that they were taller letters than those of the interior of the word, but couldn't see what they were, and the short interior letters were just a line of fog. Perfect.

I didn't note the date, but it was right after my computer crash. Now it has been several weeks. Not a long time, but not a short time either. Only now, I am quite prepared to be more patient. I now have a pretty clear baseline measurement. It has already been demonstrably important.

You see, now when I put my face a measured seven inches from the screen, I can resolve the M clearly and the ft only slightly less clearly. Sorry to say that the interior of the word is still not legible to me, but this is progress over a very short timespan.
Now it is true, I have also been working on my blood pressure and the aftermath of my stroke, so I have been doing a great variety of things for my health. And although some of those things were specifically designed to deal with the cataract, there is no way I can isolate them out and say "these are the things that helped my eyes." So, from a medical or scientific point of view, this is just anecdotal nonsense.

Just as nonsensical I suppose as only respecting the results of "double blind" studies in which neither the doctors nor the subjects know during the study who is actually getting the study drug and who is getting the placebo. This is of statistical value, but your chance of getting better is cut to 50% even before the use of the study drug. All in the name of the great god science.

I think I will just settle for getting better.
Anthro

None So Blind As Those Who Will Not See

Alright, since I am entirely alone, and this is in effect a diary, I might as well knuckle down and try to sort out the mumbo jumbo of current ophthalmologic theory.

My focus is on cataracts. The reason for this is simple. A presumably “nuclear” cataract has seriously affected the vision of my right eye, and threatens to eventually do the same sort of thing with the left eye as well.
Having first gone to see an optometrist and shortly thereafter an ophthalmologic surgeon, I was left with considerably more questions than I was comfortable with, and the answers I did receive had to be extracted almost by force, and were simplistic and routinely condescending.

Throughout this whole time, I have sought real dialogue and counsel from people in the field. I have had no success in this regard at all. The closest I came was to finally have a ten minute follow-up conversation with the surgeon with whom I had scheduled the surgery. I achieved this small victory only by canceling the operation.

During that telephone conversation, the answers I got were vague, statistical, and dumbed-down to be suitably understood by someone of plebeian patient mentality. The doctor was clearly surprised that I did not just leave her to do what she does. There are protocols in place, presumably to assure that patients are given enough facts to be able to give “informed consent.”

You are told that more than 9 out of 10 cataract operations have a good result, meaning that there is some improvement or great improvement in the sight of the eye. In the remaining ten percent, there is a range of unfortunate outcomes from no appreciable improvement to various complications secondary to the surgery, to blindness.

What is glossed over with these simplistic statistics, and what you will not hear at all if you do not dig in and ask the doctor for some specifics about some of the complications by type, is that certain complications happen to the majority of those having cataract surgeries. There is a secondary cataract which develops, much more often than not in the capsular membrane, and which is corrected by subsequently burning a laser hole in the membrane. (This is an additional procedure, done at a later time and billed separately). There are also some post surgical problems of other sorts that relate to the kind of surgical procedure performed.

What I am saying is that much of what the doctor tells you to elicit your informed consent, amounts more to salesmanship in the guise of information. And the worst of it is, I do not believe the doctor even realizes it. It is simply an artifact of how the system has evolved. It is the “routine” way they have developed as an industry to sell to their customers.

Now I want to turn to another element of cataract treatment. From the perspective of the industry, the treatment of choice for the entire range of cataracts which interfere with vision is surgical. An extremely tiny segment of the medical community thinks that any other method of reversal or stabilization of a developing cataract is worth consideration.
Surgery is the gold standard, and it is worth many billions of dollars every year.

The consensus is, if you get old enough, you will get cataracts, and will require surgical intervention. The surgery is often less than an hour and can range in price from three to five thousand dollars.

Soon I will be talking about some of the elements of the evolution of cataract surgery over the past three or four decades, some things which may be serious blunder in the field, and some possibilities which have not yet been explored. I realize that my remarks are less and less diplomatic, and will find physicians even less receptive to a conversation on this subject.

But what about the rest of you? Are you really receptive to the notion that eventually you will have to make the same sorts of decisions with which I am faced now? One would think that some of you would be moved to comment or ask some hard questions.

Inner and Outer Space

The people who are capable of effectively navigating the bureaucratic red tape of writing grant requests and running the governmental gauntlet are not the ones who can best get to the bottom of the mysteries of discovery.

To even be able to conform to the pedestrian mentalities of the officials who make the ultimate decisions on the allocation of funds require skills that are the antithesis of those which best achieve true innovation and discovery.


Let us take our efforts in space. We accomplished great, even astonishing things in the space effort, which did not just propel us into space, but sharply changed our environment here on Earth. Many sciences were accelerated due to the space effort. But the disasters and blunders have also been great. Just to name a few, we put up a telescope which had a rudimentary mistake in its’ construction, wasting billions of dollars with a single measurement conversion error. Yet we went to fix it, at great additional cost, and Hubble went on to achieve many of the great things originally intended.

We even, against all odds, landed on the moon several times.
But after a few landings, we largely turned our backs on space. We dithered. Our great motivation and resolve dissolved.

Our leadership thought it was more important to stop the menace of monolithic communism taking over the world, by interfering in the civil war of a small agrarian culture, squandering our youth and treasure for a decade. This, and other misadventures in geopolitics became the obsession of our leadership. It was a disaster of great proportions. Today we are embarked on a path of folly that promises to go on longer and bring in its' wake even greater carnage and destruction

NASA, for whatever reasons, became less and less effective in setting appropriate goals. We should have found other solutions than using the Shuttle as long as we have, for example.

Our priorities still need quite a bit of fine tuning. The Mars Phoenix Program has a lot of merit, which is encouraging. We have had some serious setbacks in our efforts to advance on the Mars front. No sense casting blame or nitpicking. The likelihood of everything going smoothly in even the best designed program is not great. And our successes have been brilliant. So our Mars effort is not going to elicit any sour grapes from me. The mistakes and disasters which have happenned can help us if we learn from them. It is only when we stubbornly institutionalize them that they defeat us.

But let us turn to some of the more interesting features of our efforts with the moon, and make some comparisons to alternative goals we might pursue. But before I continue, I would like to open the floor to ideas and opinions from elsewhere. I have noticed that since this blog got started, not much dialogue has been generated on any subject. No curiosity. No opposition. No alternative possibilities presented. What an enigma to me.

There is room for a great diversity of ideas in the exploration of space. We should also be discussing our priorities with regard to how we divide our collective resources between this and our other critical opportunities like slowing the damage to our atmosphere and its weather systems and how to deal with our ocean resources without upsetting them to the point of total destruction.

These two areas are far too complex certainly to be left to our politicians, or for that matter, exclusively to our industrial interests either, given their unbroken record of rapacious profiteering. In truth, the problems cross all ideological divides. It matters little if we are looking at a capitalistic, communistic, socialistic, or other mixtures of systems. But I only digress to illustrate the scope of the problems we must address if we are to survive and thrive as a species, without taking the entire ecostructure to irrevocable ruin.

The central theme of this discussion, going to the moon and exploring the other space frontiers, should all be considered carefully before we consider our multibillion dollar moves.

Please, someone with talent, creativity, and fresh ideas, join in. Or, short of that, if you know someone who would be of value in such a roundtable discussion, let them know that we are here. Or, rather, at the moment, that I am here.

Have we collectively become such a species of spectators, that nothing can induce us to stop lurking, and rise out of our lethargy enough to do something? Surely, some of you know someone of remarkable and unspecialized talent. Please point that person in this direction. I sure get sick of talking to myself.

You need no credentials here except your carefully reasoned ideas, communicated with a certain amount of care.
The subject is Inner and Outer Space. Certainly, given the events of recent decades, it is interesting enough to gather a group of motivated people.

I Was Going To Talk About Eye Surgery..

In eye surgery, as in the other specialties in medicine, several languages and idioms are used. Doctors spend a great deal of time learning the esoteric terminology that allows them to communicate with one another and with other “experts” in the medical and pharmaceutical and insurance industries and to the exclusion and detriment of all but a small number of their patients.

For centuries, doctors have been using special abbreviations and Latin phrases not in common parlance, to keep their patients in the dark about what was going on. These were the secret codes to the pharmacists, chemists and barbers with whom the doctors were communicating.

Yes, barbers too. They used to be intimately involved with several important medical procedures, like bleeding patients. Somewhere along the line, the barbers were demoted out of their part of the medical profession. Now they are pretty much confined to cutting hair, the safety razor having pretty much taken care of the need for a barber to shave clients.

Throughout the centuries, doctors pretty successfully went after the white witches, who engaged in a great many of the medical activities not well handled by the medical profession, like taking care of people without the monetary resources the doctors preferred in their clientele, and the midwives, who were generally pretty expert in assisting women during childbirth, but who were seen during many periods, including recent times, as encroaching too deeply in the terrain of physicians.

The doctors had membership in very powerful “guilds,” which were in essence, unions with extremely powerful political lobbying skills. They are at their most powerful today, encompassing the government, insurance industries, and the international pharmaceutical industries seamlessly. Only the “defense industrial establishments and the military have more clout.

When I was a boy, doctors still made "housecalls" now and then. One could speak privately to one's doctor without an insurance company having the right to demand charted information. A few months ago I wrote my (potential) eye surgeon a letter. My printer was not functional. I called her office, wanting her Email address. It turns out that all E-mail goes through an office employee, that the doctor recieves no private E-mail. Exactly when did patient/doctor confidentaility, and the ability to speak frankly to the doctor directly, go out the window?

A lot of lip service is paid to "informed consent." What this means in practical terms is that the doctor needs to tell you somewhere along the line that bad things can happen and that operations don't always work out favorably for the patient. The doctor might cite a statistic like, nine out of ten people have an improvement in their eyesight after a cataract operation. But you really have to probe to find out that two out of three people will need another procedure later to deal with a second cataract in the posterior membrane of the lens cavity, and that procedure too has its' own complications. In my opinion, this does not amount to informed consent. It amounts to a sales job to convince you, that at least statisically speaking, you will probably be better off with the operation than if you do not have it.

As time goes on, and as I see some of the procedures, performed by various surgeons, using different tools and methodologies, I am less and less convinced as time goes on. The patient is kept in a position of ignorance of enough detail that he cannot make really informed decision. He must simply decide to have faith in a physician he may have known for all of twenty minutes, or not.

Well, I was going to talk about some of the things that are currently in vogue in eye surgery, and detail my concerns in greater detail. These operations net the surgery industry about seven billion dollars a year in the US.

Several of the procedural events don’t make a lot of sense to me. But, in spite of the millions of people who have cataract surgery every year, I do not currently see any evidence that the public is particularly interested. I guess I’ll go read a book.

Letter To Owner of Cambridge Institute

Mr. Martin Sussman
Cambridge Institute For Better Vision

Hello Mr. Sussman,

A number of months ago, I wrote a rather detailed letter to you expressing interest in sharing some of my ideas with you. I never got a direct response, but I did get some advertisements for Eye Max Plus from your company.

As it happens, aside from my blog, Eureka Ideas Unlimited at eurekaideasunlimited.blogspot.com I have also made more than 1100 posts on Skin Cell forum, some of them quite detailed and comprehensive on health issues, including cataracts and the state of the medical arts concerning them.

I have also read your book, The Program For Better vision. It is no longer a surprise to me that I have not yet gained an audience with an ophthalmologist on the breaking edge of current surgical procedures. They do, after all, keep themselves quite well insulated from those not initiated in their closed fraternity.

I expect that one day soon, I shall be reviewing your book, both on my blog and on Skin Cell Forum. Unlike my relatively new blog, the forum has a pretty large readership and I am certainly one of the most serious regular contributors there.I am known as Anthropositor.

Once again, I extend you the invitation to contact me, and/or to invite any surgeons you may know to review my various posts, and to contact me for a dialogue which could be of benefit to a great many people.

You sir, are not a member of the closed medical society. You have even shown some indication that you were prepared to break new ground here and there. Was it just to make some money? Or do your motivations run deeper? Please advise.

This invitation is also extended to anyone in or out of medicine with an interest in innovation in the field of cataracts. This medical problem is growing exponentially, and should not be left exclusively in the hands of complacent "experts."

H. C. Benson

Innovative Eye Surgery For Cataracts

Those who have read some of my previous posts here at Eureka Ideas Unlimited and on Skin Cell Forum are already aware that I have an advanced nuclear cataract in my right eye and a developing one perhaps two years behind in my left eye.

Although I hadn’t been to a doctor for a few decades, this year I went first to an optometrist and then to an ophthalmologist and scheduled the removal of the right lens and surgical implantation of an intraocular lens.
I ultimately cancelled the surgery for a variety of reasons which I have already written about. Central among these reasons was the fact that I saw several of the procedures involving phaco emulsification of the opaque lens, the chopping of the lens into small pieces, and the removal of the pieces by suction, and the insertion and placement of the intraocular lens in the cavity left vacant.

I saw a variety of things in these procedures which gave me food for thought. To put it more succinctly, I thought better of the procedure. But one has a responsibility, if being critical of the way things are done, to give some notion how they should be done instead. So, for each part of the procedure that I thought could be improved on, I worked out some possible ways in which it could be done better.

For several months I talked about these possibilities on Skin Cell Forum. (some of the people on the forum are effectively blind, a few with exceedingly rare eye conditions requiring experimental surgery.) I am pretty confident that some of these experimental surgeons of these patients have heard about me. None, to date, has shown the slightest curiosity as to whether any of my ideas have merit. This points up, with great clarity, the ivory tower nature of the medical "community."

The surgeon who I went to, was not a “breaking edge” sort of girl. She wanted only “routine” cataract surgeries on her agenda. If any unusual incident arose, she would call in someone who could handle it. The last thing in her mind is to try anything new. And it became the last thing in mine to use her.

So, I haven’t been able to attract the attention of the pioneers, and I don’t want the journeymen surgeons. Quite a quandary. I have only personally performed one serious eye operation. The eye had been seriously damaged and was in front of the orbit, and therefore unblinkable. The patient was nearly dead, so the other traumatic injuries needed to be stabilized.

It was about a week before I was able to remove the eye safely. The only complication was some secondary infection, which I got under control in another few days. The patient made a full and uneventful recovery. I have had no training as a surgeon. Just emergencies in the field.

I really did have some hopes of finding an experienced surgeon with whom to discuss my ideas about changing the nature of cataract surgery. But the group is such an insular bunch that it is not really even a remotely likely prospect. and I won’t be engaging in the usual bureaucratic gauntlet of the hospitals and government agencies either. I’m also treating my blood pressure. Going through “channels” would not be productive in that regard. Currently my blood pressure is in better shape than my eye.

The good side is, I am learning a great deal more about eyes and vision and blood pressure as well. These are not inconsequential benefits from being more self-reliant. And if I can’t find a surgeon with whom to work out the new procedure, I’ll eventually sort out another means to restore my sight.

Irish Potato Famine and Today

This post was inspired by an essay on the Irish Potato Famine of the nineteenth century on http://aradicalwrites.blogspot.com/

I must say Sir, that this is quite a fine piece of scholarship! It is inexplicable to me that it would have received no comments.

A sad commentary on the oblivious lurkers that make up the vast majority of those on the web. One must hunt for a considerable time before finding a work written with as much care as this one was.

As an American of Anglo-Saxon and perhaps Irish lineage as well, I don't have a particular side to take in this debate. Yet, one thing has always seemed pretty clear to me; there is quite enough fault to go around.
I will comment on two things that I think were of paramount importance in exacerbating the disaster.

There was great reliance on the skills of the "experts" both governmental and scientific. This was clearly unwarranted by the facts. I mention this only because in many ways, history is now repeating itself.

(Global Warming, and the current ongoing mass extinction, previously never seen without a cataclysmic asteroid impact or similar disaster.)

But whatever the detailed reasons, it seems to me that the central issue here was dependence on a monoculture crop. A single staple food.
The emphasis was overwhelmingly on the potato, and not even a diverse variety of different tubers. When the blight struck, even with excellence in science and government (which was clearly lacking) the disaster could not have been diverted.

In most of the world today, we rely on very few food crops. But worse, we are DELIBERATELY REDUCING the genetic diversity of many of these important crops, for purely, industrial and profit oriented reasons.

I think I will transfer this comment to my blog as well, a fairly new blog which has not, as yet, generated too much dialogue. I have apparently, largely been talking to myself.

You are welcome to attend.

Trying to Supply Some Common Sense

This is a post today elsewhere, trying to help a couple of clueless guys who are far from being able to help themselves. They are so conspicuously and consistantly obtuse that I had avoided the thread as a lost cause. I won't say "casting pearls before swine." Pigs are actually very smart creatures. ...and if I had not been taught to eat the bellies of pigs very young, I would probably never do it. As it is, my consumption of swine is way down, and I may eventually get it down to zero. At that point I will confine myself to hunting and exposing human swine only.

The post:

I bit my knuckles and stayed away from this thread. Then two friends showed up, (treesandflowers and bunnie) and I'm tempted to remark "What are two nice girls like you doing in a place like this?" But of course the answer is, you are both trying to help.

Let's take a look at what we know. Both of you are in the category of what I will refer to as "long posters." That is to say, if you feel you have something worthwhile to say, you will go to some effort and care to say it well. Judging by the lengths of your short responses here on this thread, your instincts like mine are kicking in and saying, these people need professional help, or a small helping of good old fashioned common sense.

If I am not mistaken, one of the other posters was elsewhere recommending the ingestion of colloidal silver by a pregnant woman. (This by a fellow who calls himself a science teacher). This sort of "science" is perhaps part of what is wrong in the teaching in some of our schools. Another example would be the attempt to add "creationism science" to the curriculum to "balance" the "unreasonable scientism" we have been forcing down the gullets of our young ones.

My younger son had a science teacher who one day taught the class that it was acceptable and safe to shine dimes with a bit of mercury by rubbing it on them with your fingers.My son jumps up and challenges this concept before the whole class, pointing out that if you shine a dime in this way, as the dime gets shiny, the mercury on your fingers gets black. He pointed to the teacher's fingers to illustrate. I believe the teacher was actually going to let some of the children try shining some dimes.

My kid told me about the incident at the end of the day. I frowned. He said "Was I wrong?" I told him that sometimes being right is not all that counts. He was puzzled by that. I went on to explain that he did the right thing in the wrong way and it will come back to haunt him.

Here is the point. My son, clever little tyke that he was, wanted his classmates to know about the danger: That the black on the teacher's fingers was mercury that had so finely divided that it was no longer in shiny little globules, so finely divided that some of it could even get absorbed right through the skin and into bloodstream, or get residues on the sandwich the teacher would be eating for lunch.

My boy was right to want to be sure the rest of the class knew this. But he was also "showing off." (I have never been able to figure out where he got that from. His mom I expect. She was always a rather flamboyant character.)

Better would have been if he had asked the teacher for a private moment, discussed it with him, and then gave the teacher the opportunity to revise and extend his remarks. It wasn't until the end of the year that the payback came.

My son was flunked with a B+ instead of an A. He was really steamed up about it. He KNEW he deserved an A! I asked if he still wanted the A. His answer was a vehement YES. Ready to fight for it? He blurted out the military vernacular equivalent for affirmative which he was not usually allowed to say, but which he had heard me use on numerous occasions when emphasis was required.

So I helped him plan his strategy and acted as his Second in a conference with the teacher and the Principal. And in the process, my son learned a bit about how to win by other means than direct attack. He did not entirely win his fight for the A. He just got the A- that he deserved (lack of diplomacy and consideration).

(And his failure in that regard is probably due in large part to a certain enthusiasm for confrontation and lively discussion that he may have gotten from one of his close relatives.)

But getting back to what is so conspicuously absent in this thread. There is not the slightest thought that maybe the whole spectrum of general health considerations, like good nutrition or adequate rest or even the emotions might be playing a role in the problem.

Instead, just glob on some coal tar or dozens of other topical substances, many of which have serious and unpredictable side-effects. And in this, doctors are, as often as not, a part of the problem. Try using some careful reasoning and thought about your general health, making your whole body better. Your skin is integral to your body. The first healing must be from within. So look at all the features of your general health and correct as many of them as you can. If that hasn't helped after six months or so, then consider going to someone for additional help.

Adamlp How and Why To Learn

You posted a question about how I go about learning. I have thought some about learning and thinking, but never in the terms you posed. Let me give you an example. I really don't know what I am doing on this blog. I read your comment and published it, but did not have a clue what essay you were posting to. A computer conversant person would have found it without searching for more than minutes. I searched through All of the comments and never did find it. Yet I didn't want to leave a valid question unanswered if I could help it. It is not in my nature.

Since I could not find the question attached to any of my posts, the only way to address it in a way you are likely to find is to title a post with your name. Particularly since you have no blog, nor an Email address in your profile. The point is, where there is a will there is a way. How does one prioritize what one learns? Learn what is most important to you first. If you don't know, figure it out.

In typical schooling, you are pretty much fed what the school administration wants you to learn in the order they want you to learn it. There are many problems with this. It is more akin to conditioning than to education.

There is no real direct motivation. Real learning is goal oriented. It is problem solving. It is finding out, or working out, what you need to know because you need to know it. That differs from our standard institutional education which is all about learning things because others require it of you so that you will obtain some sort of advantage from complying with the requirements set out for you by the educational authorities.

A diploma. An acceptable grade. An opportunity to get a better paying job. This is all nonsense! But it is nonsense which governs most of the people in school, and which has more to do with conforming to requirements, being conditioned in doing what you are told. Being a suitable and obedient industrial employee.

You learn really important stuff, like how not to be tardy and how to get your homework in on schedule. You have undoubtedly been "schooled" in this way. Otherwise, you would know these things by instinct. I was fortunate. I was a feral child with very little institutional education. Therefore my criterion was curiosity and solving specific needs.

Many of my students come to chess class more to learn other things than to learn chess.

For true learning to occur, the actual ideas you are working on must be exciting. Otherwise, why bother? So you can get some kind of diploma? What nonsense! You learn because you really want to know something! You want to solve a problem.

Not because it was assigned to you. Not because someone requires it of you. You are having trouble even setting your priorities, largely because they are not your priorities. You have accepted as priorities what you think others expect you to learn. Stop it. Learn what excites you. what presses your buttons.

THERE IS NO THOUGHT WITHOUT A FELT NEED!

Okay, that"s enough for tonight. Future questions will not get lost if You include the title of the original post in your opening line or post on this thread. Or go ahead and post to this thread. It has your name on it. The fact that I never did find your post after I published it could mean that I screwed up, and didn't publish it as I thought I did, or that there was some kind of Blogger delay that I did not anticipate, or something else happened that I don't understand.

So I found another way to get the job done. That is learning See what I mean? I don't neet the Computer Professor to send me a DVD to make it simple. I'll work it out.

Some More Medical Heresy

This is a response to a lovely and helpful lady on Skin Cell Forum with whom I have an ongoing lively and beneficial dialogue. Her name is Bunnie. You can find the rest of the thread in her profile or mine.

Have we diverged from the subject? I don't know that we have. I am definitely not within a(n expert patient) programme. But I have taken considerably greater interest in the subject of eyes than all but perhaps 1/10000 of the patients out there.

I would certainly have stayed to view the introductory tape on cataract surgery if the doctor's (a cataract surgeon I was going to employ) player had not been broken. I was invited to come back to watch it on a later (unspecified) date, a 140 mile trip for me. I was not offered the chance to play the tape on my working machine and mail it back to her.

I am the only patient who has ever done an eye removal successfully under field conditions on a patient initially so close to death that I thought there was virtually no chance he would survive. (Fractured skull, eye in front of the orbit, clearly sightless and unrecoverable). I had to wait many days before removal of the eye for the patient to gain enough strength to survive the operation, forcing fluids and other nutrition. The patient clearly was just ready to die. I would not have it.

All of this, with more detail, is in a rarely read old thread in General Nutrition, titled Kombucha and Kefir, perhaps a half year back. The patient survived and is currently purring in my lap looking up at me with one very large Exotic Persian Cat eye.

This is some small qualification as an "expert patient." Here is more. I invented a very simple device about forty five years ago with which to easily screen groups of children simultaneously for monocularity. The earlier the diagnosis the more successful the intervention, generally speaking. It worked fine. The optometrists I showed it to agreed that it worked well, but were disinterested because they already had equipment in their offices that could do this quite satisfactorily, one patient at a time. They did not see a need for group screening. Go figure.

Why do you think I am so unenthusiastic about even approaching doctors of unknown calibre? It is NOT that I have never done it before. If I want to whack my head against a brick wall a half dozen times, I think I will just go find the nearest brick wall.

I am reminded of Carlson, inventor of the copy machine. Admittedly, it had some serious, difficult to resolve problems, and he went into major debt while he was perfecting it and trying to interest industry. Know what the typical response was of the CEO's that he presented it to? "What do we need that big thing for? We've got carbon paper!"

But there is a Happy ending. After all those years of struggle, Haloid Corporation picked up the machine and ran with it. They gave Carlson 1/10 of one percent royalty, insightful robber barons that they were. They eventually evolved into Xerox. And as for Carlson, he eventually got back on his feet and philanthropically gave away more than $100,000,000. My hat is off to him.

But as for me, I will not spend the rest of my life, hat in hand, struggling to find the right doctor. My eyes are not good enough to find a needle in a haystack. Total cost of rejecting my current surgeon candidate after one visit? About $400. I am also dealing quite effectively with slowly elevating blood pressure, and with the stroke I had two years ago, all without outside medical intervention. My extensive variety of skin lesions (of several years duration) have disappeared, also without medical supervision, with only my ministrations.

I guess the thing that disqualifies me to be an expert patient is that I am almost never a patient, and that I have become rather impatient with the general state of the art, in spite of the strides that have been made. Doctors NEED patients like me and generally have no notion that that is the case.

Why is it that no doctor has ever shown up here, or on my blog to tell me what a fathead I am and list the variety of ways I am full of **it. It is a complete enigma to me. EVERYONE is invited to go tell their doctors on me and give them copies of my relevant posts. The dentist of Biting the Dentist infamy knows my screen name and that I post regularly on Skin Cell Forum and on the blog Eureka Ideas Unlimited at eurekaideasunlimited.blogspot.com So does the ophthalmologist I visited once.

The silence is CONSPICUOUS. I am NOT trying to pick a fight. A constructive dialogue will be just fine, and it will serve the interests of all concerned. I am not out to get anybody or sue anybody. I went on a forum which was medically attended and asked a question dealing with their guideline that questions needed to be confined to two thousand characters (about 400 words). The question was deleted.

I have said very complimentary things about several doctors and at least one dentist, and have NAMED them. Those who have inspired my lack of confidence or disdain have been kept anonymous. I do not know how much more considerate I could be.

Let me close by once again quoting a doctor I respect and admire. This is a short portion of one of his books, permissable in a review, and not a violation of his rights at law. The author is Lewis Thomas. I commend all of his books. In this excerpt he is talking about the state of medicine beginning in 1776 and up into the twentieth century, but the focus is 1830 on into modern times.

"Beginning around the 1830s, medicine looked at itself critically, and began to change. Groups of doctors in Boston, Paris, and Edinburgh raised new questions, regarded as heretical by most of their colleagues, concerning the real efficacy of the standard treatments of the day. Gradually, the first example of science applied to clinical practice came somewhat informally into existence. Patients with typhoid fever and delirium tremens, two of the most uniformly fatal illnesses of the time, were divided into two groups. One was treated by bleeding, cupping, purging and other athletic feats of therapy, while the other group received nothing more than bed rest, nutrition and observation.The results were unequivocal and appalling, and by the mid-nineteenth century medical treatment began to fall out of fashion and the era known as "therapeutic nihilism" was well launched.

The great illumination from this, the first revolution in medical practice in centuries, was the news that there were many diseases that are essentially self-limited. They will run their predictable course, if left to run that course without meddling, and, once run, they would come to an end and certain patients would recover by themselves. Typhoid fever, for example, although an extremely dangerous and potentially fatal illness, would last for five or six weeks of fever and debilitation, but at the end about seventy percent of the patients would get well again. Lobar pneumonia would run for ten to fourteen days and then, in lucky, previously healthy patients, the famous "crisis" would take place and the patient would recover overnight. Patients with the frightening manifestations of delirium tremens only needed to be confined to a dark room for a few days, and then were ready to come out into the world and drink again. Some were doomed at the outset of course, but not all. The new lesson was that treating them made the outcome worse rather than better.

It is difficult to imagine, from this distance, how overwhelming this news was for most physicians. The traditional certainty had been that every disease was aimed toward a fatal termination, and without a doctor and his energetic ministrations, or barring miraculous intervention by a higher force, all sick people would die of their disease. To recognize that this was not so, and that with rare exceptions (rabies the most notable one) may sick people could get well by themselves, went against the accepted belief of the time. It took courage and determination, and time, to shake off the old idea.
Looking back over the whole embarrassing record, the historians of that period must be hard put to it for explanations of the steadily increasing demand, decade after decade, for more doctors, more clinics and hospitals, more health care. You might think that people would have turned away from the medical profession, or abandoned it. Especially since,throughout the last half of the nineteenth century and the full first third of this one, there was so conspicuously little that medicine had to offer in the way of effective drugs or indeed any kind of technology."

Okay, I'm going to stop there. I do not disparage the many advances of medicine. But many of the advances are not true advances. They are widely accepted bullsh**!

Failure and Success

we are ALL misguided to one extent or another. The medical ideas of Galen held sway for many centuries, and were largely worthless, dangerous, or deadly.

Our mistakes are important to our ultimate progress, but only if and when we recognize them. If instead we embrace the mistakes as we so often seem to do, disasters proliferate.

Politics IS bewildering! But it is because so many of its' participants are extremely bewildered in contrasting ways. And they often believe fervently that their perspectives are the only rational ones, and that those on the other sides of the question are completely wrong. Things are rarely that simple.

I have stopped trying to characterize myself as a liberal or a conservative. I have come to believe that the two party system falls short of the needs of the country. But our politics are formed by complex issues and our responses to them.

We have many different crises to deal with, not just politically, but environmentally and across the spectrum of human needs. In the larger scheme of things, within our very disasters lay the potential keys to our future.

The immensity of the World Wars of the twentieth century, the incredible carnage and waste, the suffering, the direct devolution into our present strife, the roots of our eventual (possible) success(es) are within these disasters.

Before I go on with this thought, it just occurred to me that, just as numbers of readers are sharply reduced once posts are scrolled off into archives, the same sort of reductions occur with regard to comments and replies. So before continuing I'm going to copy this and put it in the main body of the blog.

In my view, the single most remarkable thing of our time is the fact that we have gone into space. Humans have gone to the moon. We have landed robots on other planets and made close approaches to the most distant planets and their satellites.

These things most assuredly would not have happened, but for the frictions generated because of the wars and the potential for even more disastrous, even final conflagrations. This is so obvious I won't even prove the point.

The efforts of the two Superpowers both in the Space Race and the mad dash toward nuclear oblivion resulted in one of the superpowers failing economically, with the other trailing perhaps only a few decades behind.

And with the downfall of the one and the multiple and ongoing disasters in international diplomacy of the other, we took our eye off the ball and allowed our space efforts to stagnate. Why is this so important? Specifically because of all the problems that we MUST deal with. Global warming and all the associated problems. Overpopulation, famine, disease, pollution, and last but not least, fanaticism in all its' many guises.

Today there are three main schools of thought about how to proceed with the space program. Only two of them have much prospect to happen. I favor the third, which unfortunately has little likelihood of happening.

The first is to establish a permanent colony on the moon. There are a plethora of problems with this, but also some very attractive possibilities. Very costly, with the potential profits, far, far off in time.

The second is to land on, explore, and ultimately set up some communities on Mars. This is considerably more ambitious, much, much more costly, and with the potential profits for humankind far further in the distant future. In other words, these two options are likely to stall and stagnate because the require such sustained sacrifice, in exactly the same way that the space effort has stagnated over the past few decades. I am not forgetting our great strides on this frontier, but in the seventies the prevailing view was that we would be much further along in space exploration, and might even have had a lunar colony by now.

Of course all of the accomplishments in space are inspiring! And the profits, in terms of advances in many of the sciences and the practical advances that have been made possible, indirectly due to the space effort are too numerous to list. But it is not obvious to the politicians and their constituents. And the space effort has been enormously more expensive than expected, or than it should have been. And since all the spin offs do not seem at first glance to be space related, and because so much of the funding has been squandered, and there is little prospect for immediate profit, we are stuck financially between a rock and a hard place.

Let us go to the third option, the one I favor. It is getting virtually no attention in the debate. I favor missions to the Amore (earth approaching) asteroids. The mining of said asteroids, and the ultimate hollowing out of the asteroids providing space for human habitation, space for industrial production too potentially polluting on Earth, and ultimately, even farming on a large scale.

Just touching on a few of the positives of this option which are really important: These asteroids, by comparison to Mars or the Moon have virtually NO gravity, comparatively speaking. That is not an inconsequential thing. To get a single kilogram off the Moon or Mars costs many thousands of dollars. We must live with the extremely deep gravity well of the Earth. We have no choice. It is where we are. The gravity wells of the Moon and even Mars are far more shallow but are still far (by thousands of times) greater than the minuscule gravities presented by the Earth-approaching asteroids. So getting there from Earth is expensive. Sending cargo back from them is VERY cheap by comparison to the Moon or Mars.

Now let us look at the cargo value. Many, if not most of these asteroids are very high in metals of the Platinum family. The fact is that in terms of near term payoff for our investment, this is the only real viable option. Instead of going into more detail, The floor is open for debate and discussion.

Others Need Not Apply

I just came across Sermo, a site which excludes all healers and innovators without an MD or DO after their name. They did, in all fairness, extend an invitation to non physicians to check with them about being a "client" or a "research partner."

I am looking for an innovative eye surgeon to collaborate with. I am doubtful that a contact is likely to be made through this group, but it couldn't hurt to make contact. This is what I said:

Among my posts on Skin Cell Forum are the threads Preventing Viral Infections and several others which deal with such subjects as dentistry, the state of cataract surgery and disorders of the skin.

On my blog, Eureka Ideas Unlimited, you can see much of the same subject matter without as many distracting posts of ordinary mortals, often referred to as patients.
eurekaideasunlimited.blogspot.com

My name is Anthropositor. I would particularly like to have a dialogue with a surgeon who would like to break new ground in cataract surgery. Odds that such a contact will be made here are slim though, aren't they?

It would be of immense value to physicians to be less insular and full of themselves as a group.

Collective Idiocy

(This was my reply on another blog which featured in its' header an overly optimistic quote of the great Mohandas Gandhi.)

Sometimes it is inspiring quotes, soundbites from notable, even heroic and inspiring people like the Mahatma that can lead us astray.
Genocidal monsters do indeed die of old age without ever being brought to justice. One could argue that it has happened more in the twentieth century than any previous time.

And this new century shows every indicator of outstripping the last, not only in terms of genocide, but in the multiple ecological disasters which now threaten ALL life on the planet.

Mr. Greenwell is certainly correct in his one phrase comment that the world's amphibians are endangered. A quarter of the beehives on the planet have also disappeared recently and we are still clueless as to why. Bird populations too are being decimated. I could go on in this vein for a chapter or two and just scratch the surface.

The blogosphere has the potential for being a great tool for dialogues which could address many of these issues. It is currently being used mostly for asinine one-way chit-chat.

The forums too propagate volumes of nonsense. All the jabbering just drowns out reason and sense. In the half year that my blog has been in existence, not one single ongoing dialogue of any importance has developed. Lamentable. We had better start using these marvelous Internet tools more effectively folks. We are running out of time.

A Medical Comment

A number of months ago I had an uncharacteristic spike in my blood pressure of 191/110 mm hg. Although my life is sometimes blessed with an abundance of stress, I was unable to identify a triggering event or cluster of problems which could account for the reading. But bear in mind that we are not always conscious of all the stresses that might be having an effect on us.

Since then, I have paid almost daily attention to what my blood pressure is doing. (It is worthwhile to note that it is the "resting" blood pressure that is indicative of what is going on with your vascular system.) As an example, it could have been quite a hot day and I was driving a car and got quite overheated because the air conditioner was not functional. If I was just short if heat stroke for example, this could have some substantial impact on my blood pressure.

Paradoxically, I have, since that high spike, virtually eliminated the occasional use of the beta-blocker Metaprolol, a Mexican drug equivalent to Toprol XL. My blood pressure has reduced to my target values (116/76) with only dietary changes, (a sharp increase in ingested potassium bearing foods, supplementation of potassium chloride and potassium gluconate, and some reduction of sodium chloride), and a moderate increase in daily exercise.

On Monday nights, when I competitively teach chess to a group of students, the blood pressure generally climbs to about 135/88, but that is, after all, a rather challenging sporting event, with more than five hours of continuous rapid chess. By Tuesday the blood pressure is back to normal, or actually better than normal for a sixty-six year old unmedicated male.

(This post was first inspired by questions put by a woman on Skin Cell Forum earlier today who is scheduled for a surgery on her knee. This woman has had so many surgeries for so many different things, that I doubt she could even count them all with any sort of accuracy. One could refer to her as a surgery addict. Of course I didn't do that.)

Certainly the risks of laparoscopic and arthroscopic surgery are lower than conventional surgeries. Perhaps one of the unfortunate consequences of this is that they are often done as the first resort rather than the last.

Doctors could not maintain their lavish incomes and lifestyles with just good advice. They MUST do surgeries and prescribe fancy expensive new stuff. And they do so on a massive scale. I'm not going to get on a rant here. But I expect I will have more to say on this subject shortly in the thread on my blog titled A Letter To the Eye Surgeon. If memory serves it is in the March Archives.

In the meantime, the two threads in General Health here, (on the forum) one of the same name, and Biting the Dentist are relevant to the subject. It is a fact of life that there are a great many avoidable surgeries and other medical procedures. We place ourselves too readily in the hands of these experts and trust them far more than is warranted by the facts.

Doctors as a group are no more trustworthy than politicians, lawyers, or used car salesmen; all about equally rapacious and opportunistic. I stand ready to defend my remarks.

Meanwhile, since experience tells me that no doctor is going to show up and actually defend his profession, don't just listen to me. Read the various books of Lewis Thomas, a physician who does not even bother to append M.D. after his name on his works.

A Paris Hilton Can of Worms

As I write this, Paris Hilton is still at home although the Sheriff's Dept. arrived some time ago to take her to court (presumably to be properly returned to custody). The judge is in a very ticklish position. There is infighting between the prosecutor's office, the court, and the Sheriff.

I am of the strong opinion that the legal system is broken, and I am engaged in a battle in another part of California over issues which involve refusal to apprehend criminals in the process of committing crimes. There is even evidence of a conspiracy. But it is a matter is yet to be tried by the courts.

Now I am currently a couple of thousand miles from California and do not have a California Penal Code on hand. But the Penal Code Section that seems to apply is 1203, having to do with custodial authority. It strikes me that this Penal Code Section is quite likely to be used by the Sheriff to confer the final authority on him due to the ostensible overcrowding of the system, which severely affects the male inmate population.

I know what I would do as a judge, to retake judicial control in the face of this clear contempt, made possible by Federal orders to reduce overcrowding which give the Sheriff wide latitude to thumb his nose at the State Court.

If I were the judge, and I determined that this Sheriff had made an end-run around my sentence, I would preclude the possibility that it would happen again. I would use a provision of this same statute PC1203(.03). This allows the judge to order her to the Intake Center of the California Prison System for a ninety day evaluation period to determine if she is in fact an incorrigible criminal, and then decide her appropriate punishment. She would not ever get as far as State Prison. She is too rich and powerful and she is not a convicted felon. It would cost her many thousands of extra dollars to fight it though. And meanwhile, she would be in a very privileged enclave of the the Sheriff's County Jail.

Of course, some of what I have said is a bit on the whimsical side. This is not exactly how this statute was originally intended to be used, but it would not be the first time that it was used in such a creative way. Other judges have deliberately used this particular law for the very practical purpose of simply adding three months of "dead time" which would not be counted as time served. It is actually "prior" to the ultimate sentence. Something on the order of 98% of inmates who are evaluated under this program are returned to State Prison afterwards with the full sentence prescribed by law. Rarely do they get an abbreviated sentence and do county time instead of prison time.

But in Paris Hilton's case, let's see how this could work. She would be ordered immediately back into custody and held for several weeks while the Prison System determined if she fit their guidelines. She could not be released just to free up a cell for more important prisoners. (I think even Paris Hilton herself would agree, there are no more important prisoners.) Under these conditions, she could not be released without the judge himself playing the decisive role.

For poor people, the result is almost automatic. 95+% are accepted for the program. Virtually all the prospective candidates wait for such acceptance while in custody. But even in this case, where she would clearly have a large chance of being ultimately rejected by the prison system, she could not be released in the same fashion by the Sheriff. She would at the very least do a few weeks in custody waiting for the prison system's decision.

But let us say, just for argument, that she is accepted in this evaluation program. Okay, now she does the ninety days (which for a poor person) is all "dead time." That is to say, it does not need to be counted at all in the imposition of the ultimate sentencing when she is returned to appear before the judge. Of course, that is just for the poor criminals. The ones with no resources to defend themselves.

I do hope someone E-mails this to the judge and the prosecutor, and maybe even His Honor the Governor. I have it on good authority, he has some huevos grande.

I would do it myself but I am already involved in a battle in another part of the State. A battle which I am economically ill-equipped to fight. A battle brought about by another County Sheriff's Department and the collective gross dereliction of duty of five Watch Commanders and assorted Deputies and other Sheriff's personnel, as well as the workers in other enforcement agencies.

Any gutsy, skillful, crusading lawyer practicing in Riverside County, California may contact me to discuss my case. I realize that this is not a matter which is likely to have great impact in the larger scheme of things, and therefore not well placed here. But since this blog has so far accomplished not even the development of some interesting conversations, I see no good reason not to, while discussing someone as noteworthy as Paris Hilton, bring up other lawbreaking by other California Law Enforcement Agents sworn to uphold the law.

I think it is important to point out that most such breaches of the law by law enforcement do not directly challenge the courts authority because they occur at the street level before the courts have become involved. It is "street justice" performed by individual deputies with scant supervision by, in this case, five different Watch Commanders with whom I was in continuous contact or attempted contact while the crimes were ongoing with no arrests or other effective intervention.

It would also appear that the courts exercise considerable latitude to avoid inconvenient involvements, even when there are clear-cut crimes committed against citizens and complete failure of enforcement officers to do the duties they are sworn to perform.

Today I saw a judge in Tennessee drone on for what seemed like a half hour to justify giving the wife of a minister three years after she was convicted of killing him by shooting him in the back. Among other things, he cited such mitigating circumstances as how well behaved she was with her investigating probation officer and that she had no prior criminal record.

Look, I'm sort of reaching here. I have no idea what will catch the thoughts of the readers enough to get them to actually participate and contribute to improving our world. Take a look at my archives. Many of my posts have something concrete to say about a specific problem. Some, like this one, range more widely.

The widespread cynicism affecting our institutions from top to bottom is caused in part by our widespread ongoing apathy. It is not just the widespread corruption of public officials. It is not just incredible illogic. We are not paying attention. We elect idiots and then pay no attention to what they are doing until the disasters they produce are almost beyond repair.

Maybe the new piece of cheesecake will get someone's juices going. This is a good place to stop and give others a chance to express themselves.

If you would prefer to talk about Pandemics or Germs or War, Chess or Medicine, instead of something really important like Paris Hilton, go to the January archive.

In February there is an idea about Taxes, a little poetry and some more thoughts on medicine.

In March is a big post that will enable you to prevent viral infections like colds and influenza. There is also an interesting letter to an eye surgeon. Somewhere in March is also something or other on Heresy.

Then in April there is an eye-opener about more unpunished Genocide, and some encouragement to do something for Mother Earth throughout the year, instead of just on Earth day.

If you have anything to say about any of these subjects, let's hear it.

Cleanliness and Coincidence

Back before the United States largely lost its' way in the space program, I was periodically called upon to assemble equipment for use with liquid oxygen.

Of course such equipment needs to be manufactured in an ultra-clean environment, a super cleanroom in which even the air is filtered multiple times. You wear a hooded nylon suit and boots, surgical gloves and mask.

Under such conditions, what would be a short bathroom break is suddenly a procedure that takes the better part of an hour and costs a few hundred dollars in down time. Unlike the government and source inspectors whose job it was to observe every move I made as I built the device, even in a six or eight hour period of assembly, I never took a break.

Fortunately, there were always at least two such inspectors, so they could spell each other as I went on working. They never could understand how I could go for such an extended period of time without stopping. Then, even when the job was done, and we were changing back into our own comfortably comparatively filthy clothing, I would simply dress and leave, without ever going to the restroom.

I was anxious to get back out into the smog and other smells of the city. In a cleanroom, the only aromas available are the occasional whiff of alcohol or acetone or MEK or the bad breath or other scent of a government inspector.

One would not think that under such conditions, you would actually welcome the assault of the myriad urban odors that we ordinarily take little notice of. Even the sense of taste is heightened after a day of assembly in an ultra-cleanroom.

Afterwards, I generally treated myself to steak and lobster in a very dark restaurant, being served by a waiter whose intellect surpassed the combined smarts of the inspectors who had watched my every move throughout the day. (It was actually in such a restaurant, reputedly operated by the mob that J. Edgar Hoover insisted did not exist, that I first came across Ichabod. The restaurant was named after a bird other than a canary, whose name also begins with C, in Hawthorne, California.)

It was quite a few years before I saw him again. He sat down across from me at one of the $10-$20 poker tables at the Horseshoe Club in Gardena. I remember thinking how incongrous that was. Now I am less troubled by incongruity or coincidence than I used to be. I certainly never would have guessed that Ichabod would eventually become my butler. But I digress.

The point is, some of the best things in life are not particularly antiseptic.

Germ Prejudice

http://www.med.nyu.edu/communications/news/pr_219.html

This study lends greater specificity to what we have known for a long time; that most of us is not us, and that most germs are not only not harmful to our health but of benefit and essential to good health.

It also gives weight to the idea that perhaps we should not be so ready to "clear cut" bacteria indiscriminately with antibacterial products and antibiotics.

This tendency has been fed by two huge influences; the medical profession, and the makers and purveyors of hygiene products and pharmaceuticals.

They have wrongly and wrongfully, even criminally spread the notion that we can indiscriminately kill "germs" without harm to the complex ecosystem. Sort of like burning and clearing vast sections of rain forests so that we can grow corn and beans and other "useful" crops, and provide more territory for human habitation.

Only the varieties of the stupidities exhibited by our governments in international relations increase more greatly. We all need to pay much more attention, generate much more effective solutions, and stop buying into simplistic doctrinaire sound-bite answers.

The widespread desire to put a specific name to every skin condition, as one example, may be a gross oversimplification of the sort that we are collectively prone to, but that is just the tip of the iceberg. We want to label and categorize everything. And we want all our answers to be simple and short.

As extinction overtakes more and more species of life, we will see how much more complicated oversimplification has made things.