I'm trying to keep my head in the game today without much success. I thought we had a nice little recurring theme coming together in our content this month. It had to do with the evolution of medical conditions, or rather the approach to medical conditions. It seems that many diseases and conditions are going through a process that moves beyond ameliorating signs and symptoms and begins to see the condition as part of a larger systemic complex. In the evolution, caregivers build on their expanded understanding of the condition to develop common guidelines in an attempt to standardize treatment.

Dry eye is this month's prime example, as a couple of our features make clear. Glaucoma may be headed down that track as well, at least as far as the first part of the equation. Guidelines on glaucoma treatment are going to take a little more time, but there's no doubt they're coming.

Unfortunately, reality kept intruding and distracting me from my theme. It was this weekend that that the government deemed it necessary to step in and bail out our financial institutions to the tune of $700 billion. (You may have heard.)

I don't pretend to know much about these things, but it occurred to me that my original idea of understanding conditions in terms of their systemic context may actually work here too. If the conventional wisdom is to be believed, much of the cause for our current crisis can apparently be traced to individual borrowers' and institutions' utter disregard for their responsibility to the larger society. Seen in context of a national systemic condition, you arrive at the syndrome named in the headline above. It's what allows us to disregard the impending Medicare bankruptcy (and by the way, can we expect the same level of government involvement when that comes crashing down?).

Now, I'm not about to tell people who spend a decade or more in post-graduate preparation for a medical career that they're guilty of this syndrome. But maybe it's time that we started seeing ourselves in light of this systemic condition. Next month's election might be a good place to start. Maybe it's time to get past charges about things like lip-stick and pigs and computer illiteracy and hold our candidates at every level responsible for how they plan to combat the No One But Me, Nothing But Now epidemic.