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“My eyes aren’t good anymore because I’m getting old.” I hear this all the time, but I don’t really think that it is true. There’s always a specific issue decreasing the vision that, while it may be more common at older ages, is not something that affects everyone. There are certainly very elderly folks who…

I tend to dilate basically all patients who are new to me. That drives some people crazy!! “Why dilate my eye when I’m just here for this bump on my eyelid?” Here is, in my opinion, one of the fundamental truths of medicine: generally, the earlier that a disease is detected, the easier it is…

Any visitor to this website probably knows that I do eye surgery and specifically cataract surgery. Sometimes, what patients and others don’t realize is that the surgery is done through a microscope. So, I am sitting throughout every surgery with my eyes pointed straight ahead into the eyepieces of the microscope. The light that enters…

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…