The Lakota Sioux people of Dakota have one of the best preserved Native American cultures in the United States and when people think of the ‘American Indian’ it is to the culture of the Lakota Sioux that people mostly turn....
I wasn’t on call and my bleep went off. I knew without looking that it was the directorate office. Immediately my heart sank, for these calls were always about bad things. They never called to say “well done Gwyn you’re...
When I was starting off in ophthalmology my then boss had a standard spiel after completing a cataract case. It did not vary and I do not recall an instance of it not taking place. “The operation went well and...
There she was. Sitting in the waiting room with her arms crossed, tut-tutting to herself and shaking her head mournfully every few minutes. We gazed at her from a safe distance while one of the nurses confirmed what we already...
There is a song by the Amateur Transplants called ‘Finals Fantasy’ which describes in humorous detail how stressful clinical exams can be. Having not done any viva or objectively structured clinical examination (OSCE) style exams for many years indeed I...
Swansea University invited me to an Away Day. There was a whole day of lectures planned at a hotel conference suite just outside Swansea but due to clinic commitments I only caught the afternoon session; a ‘workshop’, on how to...
Adele sings a song called Hello, which is about a mythical phonecall she makes to an ex-boyfriend about how different life is now compared to when they used to date. The chorus line repeated many times is “Hello from the...
4 August 2025
| Gwyn Samuel Williams
|
EYE - General
Conferences abroad are wonderful indeed. You get to escape from the crushing grind of reality at the NHS coalface for a few days and learn about the cutting edge of your subspecialty. By the end of these events, I actually...
One of the lovely things about clinical meetings and conferences is the ability to meet with your peers and ask questions of them about their practice. Often the questions are not earth shattering, for example, it could be as simple...
The point of this series is to find variations in practice and to raise them to you, the readership, so you can review and reflect upon them. I am aware there is not always a ‘correct’ way of doing things,...
This edition’s survey questions moved away from the deep and ethically charged questions of the recent surveys and focussed on simple and straightforward issues. This is really where the surveys began in exploring the minor practice variations which we have...
Simerdip Kaur takes a look at the latest ophthalmology-related news stories and asks which are based on facts and which are ‘fake news’. Headline: Doctor prints cornea on demand! Dr Hideo Kodama from the Nagoya Municipal Industrial Research Institute first...