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During cataract surgery, we have to remove the cataract and place a lens implant. Usually this is a clear lens implant, but there are also lens implants that have a yellow tint. Does a yellow-tinted lens offers any real advantage over a clear one? The honest answer is that the difference is minimal for most…

Every so often, I get a patient who comes in with a cyst over the white part of their eyeball or of their eyelid. Often, I offer to drain the cyst as a simple procedure. However, there is a warning! A cyst is composed of a peripheral lining that secretes material into the center of…

This is a speculative post. Typically, I shy away from speculative posts, but today I am not going to. In the coming years, there will be more and more that computers are capable of doing. In something that seems to be a bit of an unexpected twist, the jobs that computers are replacing are more…

These days, I do most cataract surgery with anesthetic eye drops and some anesthetic injected into the eyeball during surgery. Previously, it was common to put anesthetic behind the eyeball with an injection, which is a technique I now use more rarely, especially for long surgeries. Sometimes, patients have very deep set eyes that are…

Recently, I had a patient who had a thin spot in her cornea. This thin spot was a damaged area that was related to not having good sensation in the eye. When the front surface of the eye does not have good sensation, it does not have sufficient autoregulatory feedback loops to keep itself lubricated.…

I believe I have mentioned this before, but I just heard about a great patient story that made me want to bring it up again. Keratoconus is a condition in which the cornea distorts out of shape and adopts more of a cone shape, which can cause the vision to really go haywire. One of…

Eyelash extensions are a definite infection risk. Recently, I read a thread on an ophthalmology forum all about how eyelash extensions are a bad infection risk and absolutely cannot be tolerated in a peri-operative setting. Get rid of them! We ophthalmologists don’t like eyelash extensions. If they have to be used, they should not be…

Gerhard Meyer-Schwickerath was a German ophthalmologist. In 1949, he used light coagulation to operate on a human eye. How did he do this? He placed a telescope on the roof of the surgery building. The telescope focused sunlight, and the focused light that came out of the telescope was then redirected using a series of…

I often hear a question after cataract surgery: can I wear my old glasses? When the question is asked, I start looking through what the patient should be seeing after surgery through their pre-op glasses and what that entails…. …but I am missing the main purpose of the question. What patients often mean with that…

In cataract surgery today, stitches are rarely used. “What??? How is my eye supposed to stay intact after surgery when there are no stitches???” The method of creating incisions that most surgeons use involves creating a self-sealing angled incision. The incision is essentially square in ideal formation, being as long tunneling through the tissue as…