British and Eire Association of Vitreoretinal Surgeons

We cannot claim that British and Irish surgeons are in some way better than surgeons elsewhere. Wisdom comes from experience. Cumulatively, the surgeons have treated thousands of retinal cases. Treatment of the retina, especially via vitreoretinal surgery, is always challenging. Mistakes can happen. Yet, mistakes are our teacher and they help us to learn. At BEAVRS meetings, from the beginning, we have never been afraid to show our worst as well as our best cases. It is this ability to talk honestly, to laugh about disasters, to share common woes that is the essence of the BEAVRS tradition. If there is any humility, it does not arise from feigned politeness, but from a genuine need for mutual support. With the passage of time, it is becoming more and more obvious that no single person has a monopoly on wisdom. Equally, one fact is clearly emerging, which is that in a group, there is real breadth and depth of knowledge. Let me illustrate this by just one strand of discussion. This is taking place online at the time of writing this editorial. A case was presented of a 59-year-old lady with cystoid macular oedema after scleral buckling surgery for a macular-on retinal detachment. The patient also had a schitic macula in the fellow eye. The patient was a low myope, with axial lengths of 25.0 and 23.8 mm. Optical coherence tomography images were posted on the Web. The discussion involved 9 surgeons and ranged from the complications of treating myopic foveal schisis over the This issue is not intended to be the proceedings of the British and Eire Association of Vitreoretinal Surgeons (BEAVRS) meeting held in Wales, November 2010. We randomly highlighted some of the topics and converted selected oral presentations into short essays. There were too many presentations, 61 to be precise, for one issue to do justice to the whole meeting. In this supplementary issue, I am pleased to include an article on fluidics by David Steel and our guest speaker from the USA, Steve Charles. Posturing after macular hole surgery was a topic much discussed in recent years and it is good to get a summary and an update from Aman Chandra, David Charteris and David Yorston. Som Prasad is a pioneer in the myriad of surgical techniques for the correction of aphakia. In this issue, he suggests an algorithm for a logical approach to the wide choice of surgical techniques and intraocular lenses. The BEAVRS was conceived 25 years ago. Its durability relied on one simple principle, namely that the meeting should encourage maximum participation. This translated into two simple rules. Everyone who comes should present. The presentations should be short and the discussions long. Over the quarter of a century and with minor variations, we have abided by these rules. Gradually but spontaneously an unexpected phenomenon came into being, which I could best describe as ‘collective wisdom’. Published online: July 22, 2011 Ophthalmologica