Try to sing the title-line of this post to the melody of Michael Jackson’s “Beat it” at the top of your lungs and you’ll get an idea of how much I want to urge you to read Dr. Howard D Palte’s review “Ophthalmic regional blocks: management, challenges and solutions” (10.2147/LRA.S64806). It is erudite, covers a very wide scope of topics relevant to ophthalmic anesthesia and outspoken on the crisis of educating ophthalmic anesthesiologists for the coming eon of old-aged societies with a great number of patients who are going to search expert care for their ophthalmic procedures, not only from ophthalmologists but also from anesthesiologists affiliated with the former. The review gives a wonderful “tour d’horizon” of relevant articles and is readable “con brio” because Dr. Palte surely knows how to embed important facts into a narrative, for example in the passage where he demonstrates how the common knowledge of just about every anesthesiologist to treat ophthalmic trauma under GA came into being or how important Venous air embolism could be relevant to our daily practice assisting vitro-retinal surgery with narcosis.
As you may know, many of our colleagues consider our special field of anesthesia as boring and although we would always defensively uphold the fun we have doing blocks nobody else knows, the deep satisfaction of safeguarding old aged people from delirum they already experienced in other GA-situations, the stimulation of discussing our esoteric knowledge with other “illuminati” of the OA-trade, there are boring moments in our trade. Dr. Palte’s article instills one again with the zeal of teaching our art and refining it to be able to better care for the patients entrusted to us. And what better aim could be achieved by scientific literature?