his section is about glaucoma — what it isn’t; what it might be and what the medical profession is doing about the condition. This is not the last word on this problem (or any other, in point of fact) and the reader is encouraged to seek out other sources of information for more details — particularly on new research. Be advised, however, that there is also a lot of misinformation on the Web about glaucoma — much of it self-serving.

What follows then, is information about glaucoma. Included, where apt, are references to various scientific papers. The reader is warned that these references have appeared, for the most part, in professional journals and are not written for the lay reader regardless of the readers level of intelligence. It is not possible to make complete sense of much of the information without having been steeped within the discipline to which the article is directed. Despite the premise in the entertaining television series The Pretender, it is not possible to learn medicine out of books — you can only pretend.