We all have some incredible stories from practice in eye care. One patient who I remember vividly was an 80 year old woman who came to see me as her 4th ophthalmologist in 10 months. She had initially had irritation of her right eye and then developed discharge associated with the irritation. She was exasperated…

One of my pet peeves as a cornea specialist is sleeping in contact lenses. When contact lenses are in, movement of the eye and blinking of the eyelids causes the contact lens to move around (as long as the contact lens fits properly). If the eye is not moving and the eyelids are not blinking,…

On February 28, the company that manufactures aflibercept, a drug used for injections in the eyeball, said that it had some bad lots of product. These lots can cause inflammation (not infection) in the eyes of patients receiving injections. It seems that the bad product is NOT related to the actual drug itself. The problem…

Yesterday, my brother-in-law asked me if there is anything he can do to prevent his eyes from getting worse. I think about these things differently than most people do, so I had to ask him some clarifying questions. What I figured out is that he, like most people, is worried about changing refractive error. An…

A few patients have mentioned K-Pros to me. These are basically artificial corneas that can be used when normal cornea transplants haven’t worked or typically don’t work (for example in situations with extensive destruction of the ocular surface). The upside for these artificial corneas is that they often give good clarity of vision in the…

When we operate, we are required to go through a checklist in order to make sure that everybody agrees about the surgery, specifically about things like identifying the patient and identifying which eye to treat. This is pretty important in order to make sure that the correct eye gets operated on, because wrong eye surgery…

Many patients are very particular about making sure that the color of their eyes is correctly identified. “My eyes aren’t green; they’re gray-green with hints of hazel!” When we look at eyes really closely, we find that there are many different colors in the iris. The iris is the part of the eye that people…

I recently heard about an insurance company that decided that it was going to stop paying for anesthesia services for cataract surgery. Personally, I have experienced many situations in which a patient gets anxious or uncomfortable during surgery, which causes that person to move around. A moving patient during microsurgery is not a good situation.…

Recently an article was published that was actually able to show a statistically significant reduction in infections after cataract surgery. The reason that it is very hard to show any significant changes in infection rates is that the rates are so low that you have to have a ton of patients to be able to…

Almost every patient I see has a numbing drop placed in the eye. Numbing drops can make eyes feel “heavy” or otherwise strange. It can sometimes help with the examination, especially in a patient who comes in for evaluation of eye irritation. These people absolutely LOVE the numbing drops! “Can I take those home with…