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I recently saw on an ophthalmology forum that a 25-year-old boxer had a cataract. Cataracts can easily form at younger ages in cases of trauma to the eye. In a boxer in the third decade of life, it’s a virtual certainty the cataract was formed from blows to the eye. Apparently, he is curious when…

When we do cataract surgery, the complication rate is quite low. In fact, it is less than one percent. That basically means that it never happens, right? Well, the risk for any individual patient is definitely low, but one percent theoretically affects 1 patient out of 100. We do several hundred surgeries per year, so…

When a patient comes in with a ruptured eyeball, my plan usually centers around stitching the hole closed and not much else. In the June 2024 edition of the journal Cornea, Dr. Lindsay Foley and colleagues published a study showing that different doctors have different opinions on how to approach the surgery. It is interesting…

In the June 2024 edition of JAMA Ophthalmology, a group from China published a study about using low levels of red light to slow the progression of nearsightedness. Nearsightedness tends to be a bigger problem in East Asia than it is in the rest of the world. That is why studies in China tend to…

During cataract surgery, the basic objective is to take the cataract out of its capsule and place a new lens implant in that capsule. There is some debate about whether taking every last fiber of the cataract out of the capsule is optimal, but it inherently makes sense to me that we should get as…

Many people getting ready to have cataract surgery ask me, “Do I have to have a physical before my cataract surgery?” Well, it really matters what one means by “have to.” There are numerous studies that indicate that, for the purpose of upcoming eye surgery, there isn’t much benefit to the physical. However, it is…

Does it ever make sense to use glasses that are “too strong”? In young patients whose eyes deviate out (instead of crossing in), eye doctors will sometimes use glasses that are designed to correct more near-sightedness than the patient actually has. The idea is that this stimulates patients to correct their own eyes against the…

In the May 2024 edition of the Journal of Cataract and Refractive Surgery, Dr. Andrew Mihalache and colleagues published a correspondence. Their article had to do with GPT-3.5 and GPT-4; they made inquiries of these two chatbots based on guidelines from the American Academy of Ophthalmology about cataracts and glaucoma. They found that GPT-4 did…

One of the diagnostic tests that is used for dry eye is placement of a paper strip in the eye. The idea is that the tears soak into the strip and along the strip, so the length of the strip that is soaked indicates something about tear quantity. In the May 2024 edition of the…

In the simplest sense, “farsighted” should mean able to see far away. Of course, the only reason to use the term is that it precludes being “all sighted,” or able to see far away and up close, so, presumably, someone who is farsighted has difficulty seeing up close. When we use the term in ophthalmology,…