When people are thinking about cataract surgery, they often think they will be able to get the surgery and be able to see without glasses. Sometimes this is the case, but most of the time glasses are still needed to some degree or another. Cataract surgery is done to remove the clouding of the lens. This clouding will cause glare, and blurred vision regardless of the glasses prescription. Medical insurance will pay to remove this clouding, and place a standard intraocular lens. Glasses or contacts may then be necessary in order to focus the sight. The good news is that cataract surgery can usually correct for the glasses prescription also. A standard lens can correct for spherical err

One of the most common questions I get is "When should I have cataract surgery?" The other way people ask this question: "Is my cataract ripe?" My view is that a cataract is "ripe" for surgery when the patient's vision does not meet their needs secondary to the cataract with a few caveats. A cataract usually gets firmer, thicker, and more visually significant with age. Since these items go together, most patients will have visual symptoms before their cataract gets dangerously thick. Therefore, we usually have the luxury of waiting for the patient to make the call that their vision is a problem. There is no absolute vision requirement for cataract surgery. Some of the earliest symptom

Above is a small video on cataract surgery. Basically, a cataract is a clouding of the lens of the eye. Think of the eye like a camera. There is a lens of the camera and this is called the lens of the eye. There is also the film of a camera, and we call this the retina. The lens of the eye can get cloudy with age and we call that a cataract. As shown in the video, the lens of the eye is inside the eye behind the colored part of the eye called the iris. With age and time, the proteins that make up the lens can cloud together and prevent the lens from being clear. The lens tends to gradually become less clear with time so that a lens of a 1 year old is more clear than the lens of a 20

We have already addressed some of the major causes of aqueous deficient dry eye. Now I would like to address evaporative dry eye. This is usually caused by a problem with the lipid layer (the top fatty layer of the three layers of the tear film). However, anything that causes increased evaporation of the tears can do this. This includes decreased blinking (such as in Parkinson's disease), not closing the eyes all the way, and it can be induced by environmental conditions such as fans, etc. When the lipid layer is deficient, the tears evaporate more and the eye feels dry. Sometimes the tear film can actually be thicker than normal, but the symptoms are still there because the quality of

In our last post, we talked about some of the basics of dry eye. In this post, I am going to talk more about the specific types of dry eye disease. First, we will talk about aqueous deficient dry eye. This is the type of dry eye that is easiest to understand and really gets the most press. It also can be very serious and indicate an underlying disease such as Sjogren's disease which can go with rheumatoid arthritis, lupus, or just by itself. We talked about the three layers of the tear film, and this type of dry eye is when the tear film's thickest layer called the aqueous layer (basically the water layer of the tears) is decreased. There are a number of causes for this entity, but I w

Dry eye is a common condition that involves the surface of the eye. Although it seems straight forward, there are actually several different types of dry eye. Before breaking down the different types, it is important to know a little bit about the tear film. The tear film is the layer that is involved in dry eye, and it is composed of three different components: the lipid layer, aqueous layer, and mucin layer. The lipid (or fat) layer is where the oil from the eye sits. It helps prevent evaporation of the underlying layers, and dysfunction of this layer can often cause the symptoms of dry eye. The lipid layer is produced mainly by the glands in the eyelids of the eye, and blepharitis (