Sorry, I'm not letting them off the hook, because it is too complicated. They are supposed to be informed, intelligent, and well meaning, but it seems for any given doctor we can only get one or two of those qualities, along with a substantial dose of impatience. Maybe it takes more than five minutes to figure this out, and they need to crack a reference book, but then I guess they can't bill at $200 an hour to prescribe pain killers and antiinflamatories.

I'm from a country where medicine is free. So all you say about prices is utter nonsense.

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Geek of all trades, master of none: the motto for my blog mostlymaths.net

This just proves your own when you fail to read my previous posts and you're just trolling around:
1. Your definition of a tear is wrong. I'll help you with that: tears are mostly composed by water and oil.
2. You failed to read my sentence: I wrote "increase the quality and quantity of tears". Therefore, it includes everything: quantity and quality of water and oil.
3. You failed to check that Omega-3 is included within all dry eye vitamins pills (at least in Spain). It has not proven to be useful. If you are into Evidence Based Medicine, you have no good evidence in favour of them.
4. You failed to read the bibliography I linked where I found the strongest evidence in favour of omega-3 to be a suspicious thesis with a too low amount of patients. This reference has been shown as evidence by two different pharmaceutics... so I guess this is their best result.
5. If you're against AREDS study, you're against the best evidence in favour of vitamins for eye-disease. AREDS I was the first study and was certainly skewed, check AREDS II and you'll get an even worse result. So, no, there is conclusive evidence in favour of vitamins.


Thank you, you may ask any of my patients and they'll confirm this part of the sentence. About being impatient: imagine yourself working in a hospital with 40 patients. One patient every 10 minutes. Non-stop. Some of them need more than 10 minutes. By midday, you already have 1 hour delay and patients start complaining about the delay and yelling at you. One day after another.

So yes, we tend to be impatient in the Spanish public health system to avoid people yelling at us. The same doctors on the private health system spend way more time per patient. That may be the difference between free cost for the patient and 100$ per hour.
If you paid 200$ per hour to an ophthalmologist you didn't trust and you're not happy with him, get another one or deal with it. It's not my business.

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My blog about Go and Boardgames: Alejo's Tenuki

Ah whew you came back, I was just getting started!

Well, one conclusion that you can draw from AREDS, is that vitamin supplements can and reduce disease in the very least, another is that doctors aren't bright enough to feed themselves properly. Now please O mystic fascist drug doctors, please can we have some vitamins, I know the supplement companies can't afford large scale studies, like your big Pharma pals, and you have every under powered study memorized, but please can we have some vitamins, eye think it might help.

I think some people missed the point that I was critizing the entire medical profession(which alejo has sided with) , so I went ahead and edited the post to reflect the broader implications.

guys.. I think you wondered off into biology just a bit too far.

Can we switch back to the 10000 hour training related to go?