Nearsighted people who also have trouble seeing close up are in a bind. My mom has worn glasses for distance vision since she was a kid, but now (along with countless other baby boomers) she’s also having trouble reading. She wore contacts to my sister’s graduation so she could see the students onstage, but then she couldn’t read the program.

People like her sometimes wear reading glasses over their contacts, but it turns out there might be a better solution.

The FDA recently approved a LASIK eye treatment designed to surgically customize each eye. The surgery corrects all the nearsightedness in one eye and only part of the nearsightedness in the other eye. The fully corrected eye is used for distance vision, and the under-corrected eye is used for seeing things close-up.

Bionic eyes aren’t new, but permanently differentiating eyes is novel. Instead of switching between contacts and reading glasses, people like my mom can now just switch eyes.

News from the other end of the body: Johnson & Johnson is seeking foreign approval for dapoxetine, a drug designed to fight premature ejaculation. In 2005, the FDA rejected the drug because of side effects including nausea and momentary loss of consciousness. (The article I read didn’t say when these losses of consciousness occurred. Were they during sex? If a man faints in flagrante, does that count as lasting longer?)

Johnson & Johnson tested their drug on men who ejaculated an average of one minute after the start of intercourse. Their partners were actually timing them with stopwatches. Take a minute to picture that. (“Ready, honey? On your mark, get set, go!”) In clinical trials, men taking a placebo lasted only two minutes, while the men on dapoxetine lasted three to four minutes.

Dapoxetine is a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), which puts it in the same class as Prozac and other popular antidepressants. For some people who take them, these antidepressants can have serious sexual side effects, including difficulty in reaching orgasm. The problem can be so bad that a lot of patients go off their SSRIs, but men with premature ejaculation sometimes take SSRIs to cause this “problem.” Dapoxetine has the same effect, but it would be a better choice than other SSRIs because it works faster and stays in the body for a shorter time.

Now for some confusing news: It turns out smokers are less likely to get Parkinson’s disease. The effect has been observed for years, but it was confirmed by a recent review that pooled data from over 11,000 patients.

Current smokers were 32 percent less likely to get Parkinson’s than their non-smoking counterparts, and the protective effect was seen even in people who quit years earlier. Cigarette smokers weren’t the only ones affected, since people who smoked pipes and cigars also had a lower risk of Parkinson’s.

The way smoking prevents Parkinson’s is unknown. It’s possible that chemicals like nicotine or carbon dioxide could be protecting the specific neurons implicated in Parkinson’s disease. Or, the cigarette smoke could be acting on certain enzymes to prevent the formation of brain-damaging toxins. Another idea is that certain traits make some people both more likely to smoke and less likely to get Parkinson’s.

People who smoke and get lung cancer don’t get much sympathy. It’s their own fault they’re sick; they shouldn’t have been smoking. I hope the same doesn’t happen to Parkinson’s sufferers. It’s their own fault they’re sick; they should’ve been smoking!

The whole thing makes me feel like some malevolent entity is throwing around double binds with deadly diseases. I’m ready to give up and go eat a pint of Haagen-Dazs. If it causes heart disease, it must protect against Alzheimer’s.