Uncategorized

There is an association between thyroid disorders and ocular disorders. The “classic” association is between overactive thyroid and eyes bulging out. In the November 2022 issue of the journal JAMA Ophthalmology, Dr. Yuan Pan and colleagues published a study that indicated that oral doxycycline might improve some of the symptoms of this thyroid eye disease,…

In the November 2022 edition of the journal Ophthalmology, Dr. Golnoush Mahmoudinezhad and colleagues published a study that indicated that heavy smokers with glaucoma are more likely to lose visual field than non-smokers. Glaucoma is a disease the affects the optic nerve in the eye and causes loss of side vision before central vision. That’s…

In the November 2022 edition of the journal Cornea, Aditya Ghorpade and colleagues report a case of a fungus. A fungus? Oh, yes, there is a fungus among us, and that fungus has shown that it can infect humans. It is actually well known in ophthalmology that fungal infections of the cornea occur, and they…

The iris is the colored part of the eye. In addition to giving people character to their eyes that they love to discuss (e.g. “brilliant blue eyes”), the iris controls light entry into the eye. Regulation of how much light reaches the light-sensing cells in the retina is important, so people who have damage to…

The very front part of the eyeball is the cornea, which I sometimes liken to a “windshield” over the eye. If there is not perfect radial symmetry of the cornea, we say that there is astigmatism. The most common form of astigmatism is one steep axis perpendicular to one flat axis–sometimes we say this is…

There is a procedure that is now not commonly done in ophthalmology called radial keratotomy. When RK is initially done, it gives a pretty nice result for correcting the need for glasses in near-sighted individuals. However, as time goes on, the vision becomes less and less desirable. The biggest problems that I see with RK…

The October 2022 edition of the journal Cornea contains an article by Dr. Prashant Tailor and colleagues. It describes a patient who was injured in the eye by an oleander leaf. Plant-related injuries to the eye often require different treatment than other injuries to the eye. In this case, the patient developed severe swelling of…

I just discovered a video from Dr. Lawrence Tenkman, the EyeNinja. He is an incredible communicator and very funny! The video that I saw was definitely mostly directed toward ophthalmologists, but when people are that good at communication, it seems a shame to keep the audience so limited. It is a good lesson to all…

As ophthalmologists, we pay attention to detail. I suppose it is true that most professionals do, but I was reading some forum posts from ophthalmologists about very subtle aspects of cataract surgery. They were discussing and debating over the course of thirty or forty posts, mainly focusing on different techniques that arguably would make no…

In the August 2022 edition of the Journal of Cataract and Refractive Surgery, there is an article edited by Nicole Fram about a patient who had BrightOcular iris implants placed to change her iris color. There is a lot of technical discussion in this article, but the important message from the article is that this…