Recently, I heard the story of a patient. He has been happy with the outcome of his cataract surgery for years, but he has now seen someone else who got a special lens implant with their cataract surgery. He is envious of that outcome, and he is wondering if he can get his implant “swapped…

When asked about their history of eye problems, many people tell me they have “a stigmatism in [their] eye.” What is that? Actually, astigmatism is a single word that indicates that the corneal curvature is not perfectly symmetric and smooth. The cornea is the very front part of the eye. Sometimes, people describe an cornea…

When we perform cataract surgery, we take natural crystalline lens out of the eye and replace it with an artificial lens implant. I sometimes describe the natural lens of the eye as an M&M: there is an outer “candy shell” with “chocolate” inside. The chocolate represents the cataract itself, and the candy shell represents the…

When we perform cataract surgeries (and even other eye surgeries), we need some space to work. When the incision is made into the eye, all the fluid in the eye will run out and there will be no space between eye structures. Therefore, we inject a substance called an “ophthalmic viscoelastic device” (OVD or simply…

When performing cataract surgery, it is important to realize that the surgery puts energy into the eye. That energy can damage the inside of the cornea. I often have conversations with patients in which I tell them that the “inside part of [their] cornea doesn’t work as well as it could.” This means that I…

One of the biggest frustrations in practice occurs when there is a technical issue. Either the computers stop working as expected (usually this is the smaller issue), or the system that runs the electronic medical record has a problem (which is the “main pain”). Given that patient histories are in the medical record, we often…

Many patients ask me how long surgery takes. The answer is more complicated than it may seem. Usually, a “standard” cataract surgery is short by surgery standards, but the number of minutes a cataract surgery actually takes from incision to completion does not represent how long the process takes the patient. There are so many…

When we talk about vision testing, we usually consider people reading eye charts. A visual acuity of “20/20” means that we expect someone to be able to see that part of the chart from 20 feet, and we think that that person can see the chart from 20 feet. So, if the second number (the…

Sometimes when we perform cataract surgery, the cataracts are so dense that we have to modify our technique. In order to properly see what we are doing, we sometimes need to use a dye with these dense cataracts. The dye I use is called Trypan Blue, and it is a deep royal blue color. It’s…

There is a technique in eye surgery in which parts of lens implants are directly placed into the wall of the eye. Typically, this is not how lens implants are placed. However, this technique can be helpful in certain complicated eye situations. I recently learned that one of the first doctors to describe this technique…