User:ChasFAdams/sandbox

I began this Wiki search with an in-depth and in-breadth search of Retinitis Pigmentosa (RP) and night blindness, Nyctalopia and their Disambiguations, because I accompanied a lady with seriously increasing difficulty with night driving, therefore decreasing highway safety as she passed her (daytime?) DMB vision test without a hitch, (as I was remembering a dear friend's husband who continued his night time driving with serious life threatening RP. On the wall of the Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) was cyclically projected the faces of two people, a 5 year old boy and a a 38 year old young man who had been killed by drunk drivers. And I wondered how many of the other about 20,000 people killed by people with impaired vision, day or night, -- but especially at night -- because it seems that none of the millions receiving vision testing at all the DMVs are ever tested for such things as RP much less incipient nyctapolia or other hazardous driving pathologist.

This quickly plunged me into three definitions of the general topic definitions of Medicine which shockingly revealed a quite serious omission and major gap in medicine that not surprisingly mirrored a major gap in the discussion of Retinitis Pigmentosa and Nyctalopia: the whole area of "Public Health" and its Epidemiology, i.e. the application of Mathematics to medicine and statistical quantification -- as opposed to "individual medical patient treatment." This glaring omission in the case of RP and as a "public health" and its public health quantification is clearly seen in comparison with the "public health costs" of Drunk Driving, where it is well publicized in the "medical and human costs" of drunk driving, where about 20,000 are killed a year (and hundreds of thousands are injured along with 45 billions in property damage, even if only a few hundreds are killed each year from RP and perhaps Nyctalopia -- or perhaps the medical trmma of epilepsy seizures (which WebMD reports has newly diagnosed in 125,000 people a year). Yet even these two conditions are considered serious and by some DMVs requiring "medical intervention" when detected, (as some DMVs also treat declining senior driving performance in old age, restricting or revoking driver permits.)  Not a word is written or spoken of RP etc. in these Wikipedia's article about RP and "Public Health."

Wikipedia's article on RP -- for the average reader (like myself) -- cannot be considered marginally acceptable as a "medical" article if these "public health" considerations are not addressed, even if such deaths and injuries are but a hundredth the community cost compared to drunk driving -- especially when drunk driving "rates" are so much smaller in many other countries!

Simultaneously with addressing the serious omission flaw in the RP and night blindness omissions, Wikipedia also needs to address the much more serious omission of perhaps 15% to 25% of the people occupied in the Public Health Professions who are fully or at least partially employed treating "groups" -- not in treating individuals serially -- especially in the fields covered broadly by Epidemiology, especially research in both universities and the pharmacological industries at the national and international levels such as the United Nations, especially the production of medical statistics. (Just and additional paragraph or two in each "medical discussion" would be the minimum require to correct these incredible omissions!)ChasFAdams (talk)