“We are still ashamed of our own history”

Ageism: we are our own worst enemy.

In 1969, Butler (1969) first coined the term "ageism" to confront "prejudice by one age group toward other age groups" (pp. 243). As with other "isms," such as racism and sexism, ageism leads to bigotry and discrimination, though it is a very distinct beast in that, for the most part, other "isms" refer to those different from ourselves: distinct, mutually exclusive, and impervious groups. Conv...

Do we own our bodies?

We are the ones who impede our own progress.

To the Editor: Recently, an updated Practice Advisory has been published regarding perioperative visual loss associated with spine surgery. I feel the need to highlight certain statements in the Advisory that are contradictory to the long-standing effort in the anesthesiology/critical care communities to place fluid management on a more rational basis. Starting decades ago, significant effort h...

How we perceive our own retina

Ever since the days of René Descartes, in the seventeenth century, the search for the relationship between subjective perception and neural activity has been an ongoing challenge. In neuroscience, an approach to the problem via the visual system has produced a paradigm using perceptual suppression, changing with time. Cortical areas in which the neural activity was modulated in temporal correla...

Can We Become Victims of Our Own Success?

T he last 5 years seem to have marked a transition in the history of diabetes care. Whereas for two decades we have preached the importance of good glycemic control to manage the risk of diabetes associated complications, the truth of the matter is that rarely did patients with diabetes achieve target A1C levels Ͻ7%. As reported in Diabetes Care in 20008 in an analysis of the National Health an...