Welcome, and strabismus links

[pw...@yahoo.com]

http://www.aao.org/ American Academy of Opthalmology. Use search to
find strabismus articles, http://www.aao.org/aao/find_eyemd.cfm to find
local ophthalmologists.

http://www.aapos.org/ American Association for Pediatric Opthalmology
and Strabismus.

http://www.eyemdlink.com/ EyeMDLink.com. "...dedicated to the
education of the eye care consumer, written and prepared exclusively by
board-certified ophthalmologists (EyeMDs)."

http://www.strabismus.org/ Optometrists Network: About Strabismus.
Strabismus treatment options from optometrists.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strabismus Wikipedia Strabismus article

http://groups.google.com/group/sci.med.vision Usenet vision/eyesight
newsgroup.

[pw...@yahoo.com]

I highly recommend that everyone browse the
http://groups.google.com/group/sci.med.vision Usnet newsgroup (the last
ink above). It has posts going back quite a few years about everything
related to vision. Once there, you can also type 'Strabismus' in the
top right text box and click 'Search this group', to see all the
articles that contain the word 'strabismus'.

[pw...@yahoo.com]

You can subscribe to sci.med.vision and add it to your Google groups,
just like this group. After subscribing, if you want to change your
email delivery, first click to read the messages, then click the
'Unsubscribe or change membership' link at the top of the list of
topics. Then, you can change your membership to receive individual
emails, daily digest, or read on the web only, just like this and other
Google groups.

Usenet, of which sci.med.vision is a part, predates the web. There are
10's of thousands of newsgroups covering almost every conceivable
interest. Before Google added the web-browser interface to read and
post to them, people used off-line newsreader client programs instead,
and many still do, including yours truly. The newsreader connects to
your ISP's news server and downloads new messages of the groups to
which you're subscribed. You can read and reply to them off-line,
then, later, reconnect to the server and post your replies, if any.

After you add sci.med.vision to your Google groups, then, each time you
sign onto Google groups, you can see, in your left sidebar, how many
new messages have been posted since the last time you logged on.

I checked sci.med.vision's archives, and I can see messages going back
to at least 1994. I've been a subscriber since around 1998.

There's an important caveat when posting to Usenet. Each post will
include your email, and, since anyone can access Usenet, spambots
regularly go through it and harvest email addresses. Newsreaders have
a feature that allows you to post using a fake email address so that
your real one won't ever be seen. If you want to post from Google,
though, they have a solution here:
http://groups.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=7885&query=usenet%20email&topic=&type=

This problem doesn't occur for this Google Strabismus group, because
all the messages only exist on Google's servers, and, when non-members
browse them on the web, members' email addresses are masked.

More about Usenet's history is here:
http://groups.google.com/support/bin/static.py?page=basics.html

[pw...@yahoo.com]

An interesting anomaly is that, when you 'Search for groups', you see
on the resulting groups list the # of subscribers for each group, but
that number only includes those who are subscribed to them from the
Google web interface, and, for Usenet groups, doesn't include the many
who instead access them using an off-line newsreader.

For instance, the groups list says that the Usenet group sci.med.vision
has 609 subscribers, but, believe me, many more than 609 read and post
to that group (maybe thousands), but they do it using off-line
newsreaders connected to their own ISP's news servers, not from the
Google web interface.

I've notified Google of this anomaly.

[pw...@yahoo.com]

Besides sci.med.vision, I've also occasionally seen posts about
strabismus in the misc.kids.health newsgroup. Also, I recently ran
across some posts in the alt.lasik-eyes newsgroup that seem to indicate
that lasik can sometimes trigger strabismus. I didn't see all the
details though, and maybe the strabismus is just temporary in some or
most cases, etc.