Letters to the Editor

Readers write: Letters to the editor, May 10, 2017

Letters show obvious bias

I realize yours is a very liberal newspaper as evidenced by the fact that almost all of your non-Alaska articles are from The New York Times, L.A. Times and The Washington Post. But your Letters to the Editor page bothers me more.

I know that conservatives write letters to the editor, but they are seldom printed. I have written several letters that were well-written, factual, logical and nondemagogic. Yet you continue to print letters that are poorly worded, contain numerous false statements, are illogical and are demgogic. Many show people's ignorance of our Constitution and form of government. You even print letters from the same people on a regular basis.

You know that there are more "conservatives" than "liberals" in Alaska but your obvious bias has no balance at all. Is that what they taught you in journalism school? Probably, sad to say.

As in Berkeley, freedom of speech applies only to liberal speech. All other should be suppressed in order to protect a person's "safe" space and to deny the opportunity to hear an alternate view.

— Jerry P. Jones
Anchorage

Great harm in wrong hands

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Dear Alaska senators:

My name is Oliver Korshin. I'm a general ophthalmologist, with an M.D. degree from Harvard Medical School, a straight internal medicine internship at Boston City Hospital and a combined three-year residency in ophthalmology at the U. S. Public Health Service Hospital and at Letterman Army Medical Center, both in San Francisco. I am also boarded in general preventive medicine.

In 1982 I was assigned to the Alaska Native Medical Center as the chief of the ophthalmology service. This meant that I not only worked at ANMC, but in the Bush, holding clinics in Ketchikan, Sitka, Dillingham, Bethel, Nome, Kotzebue, Fairbanks and Barrow. I was also responsible for hiring not only ophthalmologists, but optometrists, most of whom worked full-time in our regional centers, and with whom I worked closely on a daily basis, both in person and by phone. I have the greatest respect for those optometrists and for their profession.

I have long since entered private practice: I am now 74 years old and no longer perform ophthalmic surgery — hence I really do not have a dog in this fight, so I think I can justifiably take a disinterested position on the surgical implications of Senate Bill 36/House Bill 103. These are bad bills, for all the reasons you have heard from my younger colleagues, who every day perform vision-saving surgery on our Alaska citizens (and on tourists who fall ill or are injured while vacationing here: think fish hook and sinker injuries to the eye).

It's not a "turf war" when these dedicated surgeons oppose SB 36/HB 103: they oppose it based on their training and experience, as well as on the Hippocratic Oath, which all of us, as medical doctors, must take. The oath addresses a number of ethical standards, including: "First, do no harm." We obey this oath every day as a basic precept of medical practice, not as a way to dodge medical malpractice lawsuits.

I do not know what oath, if any, optometrists take, but SB 36/HB 103 violates the "first, do no harm" admonition, because optometrists have neither the training nor experience to perform complex, high-risk ophthalmic surgery, which these bills would inevitably allow, given the broad, open-ended latitude they give to the Optometric Board to define what surgeries their licensees may perform. Scalpels, needles and laser beams can do great good, but they can also cause great harm in the wrong hands. Just because a person has a private pilot's ticket does not mean he can fly a passenger jet, yet that is the essence of these bills: allowing licensees to perform procedures in which they have zero in-depth training or experience.

You, as senators, also do not take the Hippocratic Oath, but I am sure every one of you is fully dedicated to the protection and safety of the Alaskans you serve.
Alaskans will be ill-served by the passage of these bills into law.

Please vote "No" on SB 36.

— Oliver M. Korshin, M. D.
general ophthalmology
Anchorage

The views expressed here are the writers' own and are not necessarily endorsed by Alaska Dispatch News, which welcomes a broad range of viewpoints. To submit a letter under 200 words for consideration, email letters@alaskadispatch.com, or click here to submit via any web browser. Submitting a letter to the editor constitutes granting permission for it to be edited for clarity, accuracy and brevity. Send longer works of opinion to commentary@alaskadispatch.com.

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