My patients are sometimes confused about eye pressure. What is eye pressure? The pressure of the fluid inside the eyeball is higher than the pressure of the air outside (atmospheric pressure). That keeps the eyeball firm and round instead of floppy and collapsible. The pressure of the fluid in the eyeball is controlled by production…

I posted in the past about injecting antibiotics in the front of the eye to reduce post-cataract surgery infections (from a very very low rate to a very very VERY low rate). I wrote about how choosing vancomycin as the antibiotic might cause more harm in some patients, so it is very controversial whether it…

Yesterday I went to the Cecil County Chamber of Commerce networking event. It was the first time that I realized that my practice in Delaware caters to Maryland patients! Our practices in Bear and Smyrna may be some of the closest ophthalmology offices for residents of Southern and Eastern Cecil County, especially for those looking…

When we perform cataract surgery, we place an intraocular lens implant in the eye. Why do we need an implant? A cataract is a cloudy lens of the eye, and the lens in the eye is an important source of focusing power for images onto the retina. When we take the cataract out, the eye…

One of the topics that has come up frequently in hospital-wide meetings that I’ve attended lately is the role of phone apps in health care. We have been presented with the idea of care via phone, where someone essentially presses a button in an app and gets to video chat with a health care provider.…

One of the things that I have learned in practice is that I didn’t learn something in my training. Only after starting work did I realize that patients think that doctors know things about health insurance. While we may know more than the average person since we have to deal with it more often, with…

In my opinion, cataract surgery is close to, if not definitively, the most reliably successful thing we do in medicine. So, if someone gets a bad infection after surgery, it’s especially painful for both the patient and the surgeon, who are both expecting great results. Fortunately, infections inside the eyeball after cataract surgery are very…

One of the most common things I hear from my patients in the office is that they have bouts of stinging of the eye. Usually it is just one eye, but sometimes it is both eyes. Often, it has never happened before. Even more frustratingly, it often does not happen at the time they come…

There are two very common reasons for eye watering. Interestingly, we don’t commonly think of eye watering as being a result of overproduction of tears. One cause of eye watering is blockage of the drainage of tears. If there is a block of the drain of tears, the surface of the eye will accumulate lots…

Many of my patients have mentioned to me that they have been told that they are no longer candidates for LASIK due to age. The truth is that LASIK generally becomes safer as patients age, so it is not really a safety issue. The laser also has no more difficulty creating an ablation in an…