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New Webpage on Glaucoma

Question:

ANNOUNCEMENT: The Center for Current Research has launched a new webpage on glaucoma (www.lifestages.com/health/glaucoma.html).  The page provides free background information on glaucoma, with an opportunity to hire the Center’s expert staff to locate the most recent research on glaucoma in the current medical literature worldwide.

Response:

For that purpose, the ‘http://’ should also be included. Ray

Response:

Just reading the first paragraph of your web page, clashes me with the following: You *define* glaucoma thus: "Glaucoma is an elevated pressure in the eye resulting from a failure of the fluid which nourishes the organs of the eye (called the ‘aqueous humor’) to drain through the usual ocular openings." That hasn’t been the definition for a long time, if ever.  Gleams is a newsletter of the ultraconservative Glaucoma Research Foundation (San Francisco) designed to propagandize glaucoma patients and monetary donors.  Even *it* has this to say about glaucoma in its Winter 1997 issue: "What causes optic nerve damage?  Until recently, glaucoma was largely defined as "pressure within the eye higher than the statisical norm of the population."  It was long believed that this elevated introcular presure (IOP) would cause a certain type of damage to the optic nerve, called glaucoma. "This view is too simplistic, since high eye pressure is not always required to cause the optic nerve damage seen in people with glaucoma. Other factors are probably involved.  The adequacy of blood flow may play a role, as well as certain factors which may damage the optic nerve, or the interruption of factors which are required to maintain its health." The name ‘ocular hypertension’ is currently given to what you define. Glaucoma is presently defined around actual detected objective nerve-head damage and/or the correlate subjective symptom of visual deficit at (a) specific location(s) in one’s field of view, of a nature indicating such nerve-head damage. Actually, the peer-reviewed medical literature divulges that some physicians did not view IOP as the *cause* of glaucoma at the time von Graefe characterized and named this eye condition in the 1850s. Similar to other detrimental conditions in the human body, glaucoma describes tissues that are defective, for whatever reason, but most often as a result of proper receit of nutrients via the circulatory system (blood).  Tissues that aren’t healthy may not be able even to resist *normal* or even *subnormal* pressures, but that’s an after-the-fact-of-damage issue.  There are many research papers that your "experts" should be aware of which corroborate my statements, so why do you print what you do on your Web page? The top-leve breakdown of "primary"/"secondary" is also trite, and ’secondary’ can refer to a cause outside the ocular orbit, not just a "pre-existing eye disease".  Essentially *all* glaucoma ought to be looked at as "secondary" to something, whatever its location within the body. Also, glaucomatous damage is usually considered to be damage to the optic-nerve head, rather than to "the retina", because it is desired to distinguished it from quite defective conditions in the various non-neural layers of the retina — but I suppose this is an arguable quarrel over where the retina leaves off and the optic nerve begins. The distinction between "open-angle" and "closed-angle" is also not all that neat.   Where this distinction leads to confusion, traditional glaucoma specialists choose to then claim *both* mechanisms (which they can’t really characterize in reality) are in operation at the same time.  All this says is that their categorization scheme is Mickey-Mouse. You state that "in closed-angle glaucoma the rise in pressure is sudden, affects only one eye, and is accompanied by severe pain." Only *acute* such glaucoma is accompanied by pain, and certainly open-angle glaucoma and  ocular hypertension without revealed damage, if they present very high IOPs, and are unmedicated, are "accompanied by severe pain".  I don’t believe glaucoma specialists claim that closed-angle glaucoma in general "affects *usually* only one eye," as you say.  Probably "usually" only one eye manifests closed-angle glaucoma  *acutely*.  (Its true that I have glaucoma only in one eye — and I don’t care whether they want to called ‘closed-angle’ or ‘open-angle’ or a mixture thereof.  I only care whether they have something that gives indication of arrest of progression by *any* mode, which has not been the case in my instance.) Ray (lay person)

Response:

c…@libertynet.org (Center for Current Research) wrote: >ANNOUNCEMENT: >The Center for Current Research has launched a new webpage on glaucoma >(www.lifestages.com/health/glaucoma.html).  The page provides free >background information on glaucoma, with an opportunity to hire the >Center’s expert staff to locate the most recent research on glaucoma >in the current medical literature worldwide.

You should put URLs on lines separate from anything else, including punctuation, so that all newsreaders that can directly call a Web browser, as a result of mouse clicks on the URL as cited, will work. Ray

Response:

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