Power and addiction: The making of the modern addict

This article provides a genealogical analysis of the 'discovery' of the modern phenomenon of addiction. It considers how the emergence of a bio-politics of the population in the industrialising West facilitated the invention of addiction and supported an argument for the regulation of opiate use. As a result of regulation, particular patterns of opiate use became increasingly visible. In response the medical profession, in the late nineteenth century, through the use of power-knowledge strategies transformed opiate use from a diverse set of social valuations to a unified pathology associated with madness, or unreason. This constitution of addiction as a negative category has been developed and appropriated by other discourses to provide the foundation for disciplinary interventions directed towards the regulation of undesirable patterns of consumption.</p

Bifocal lens control of myopic progression in children

Free to read Bifocal spectacle lenses have been used as a strategy to slow myopic progression in children since the 1950s and perhaps earlier. The reported success of this strategy varies greatly, as does the design of studies reporting the outcomes of their use—from earlier retrospective analysis of records to later prospective clinical trials. Collectively, published data support the suggestion that bifocal lenses inhibit myopic development in children but only by a small amount and only in a subset of children. Possible reasons for the greatly varying outcomes include a lack of individualism of the treatment and failure to take the vergence system into account. This review summarises the results of bifocal and multifocal studies, describes how accommodation, convergence and their interaction are linked to myopic development and details how a bifocal treatment that takes this into account may be devised. Also discussed is whether alterations to peripheral retinal blur contribute to bifocal lens effects