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…

Glaucoma is a relatively common disease, but most people don’t really understand what glaucoma is. We generally think of glaucoma having to do with high pressure in the eyeball. Just like everybody has a blood pressure, the pressure inside the artery system, everybody has a pressure inside their eyeballs too. The eye pressure doesn’t exactly…

When I see patients who are very near sighted, I like to remind them that they have a higher chance of retinal detachment than people who are less near sighted. Sometimes, I get blank stares in return, so I thought that this would be a good forum to discuss the concept in a little more…

One of the biggest fears that a surgeon has when performing laser vision correction is that a patient will develop post-LASIK ectasia. Ectasia is the word used to describe a cornea that thins and bulges out. A big issue with ectasia is that sometimes glasses can’t correct vision. Patients might require hard contact lenses or…

In a recent article written by Kane et al. from Australia, there is a comparison of intraocular lens power calculation formulae. When cataract surgery is performed, the natural lens of the eye is replaced by an artificial lens that usually sits in the position in the eye that the natural lens had previously been. In…