The story of blindness and efforts to prevent and treat it cannot be told without going back to the earliest recorded history of blindness. Trachoma was described in ancient Egypt, cataract surgery in India about the fifth century BC and...
A 55-year-old gentleman presented with a ‘blurry patch’ to his left eye which he had noticed for the past two months. The visual acuity with correction was 6/5 in the right eye and 6/6 in the left eye on the...
The author shares a clinical case from Edinburgh Royal Infirmary’s archives. It is not often in the course of a clinical career that one gets the opportunity to review a patient who had been treated by a pioneer neurosurgeon some...
“I can hear people smile” As a young adult in the 1980s and 1990s I gradually became more politically informed with occasional forays into BBC’s Question Time. In doing so, I learnt of the rise of politician David Blunkett, a...
Learning how to refract requires theoretical knowledge, practice and determination. Refraction is a notoriously challenging skill to acquire and the competing demands on junior ophthalmologists can often be restrictive of the development of this core skill. To consolidate theory learnt...
Quite often, in the working week as an ophthalmic photographer, you will be given that patient with ‘swollen discs’ to image. These swollen discs could be a number of things, but mainly fall into one of two categories: papilloedema or...
Over the past decade, myopia has shifted from a common childhood inconvenience to what global health leaders now call a “public health emergency in slow motion” [1]. According to Professor Serge Resnikoff, former Head of Eye Health at the World...
The authors remind us of the revolutionary impact gases have had on retinal surgery. In 1938, Rosengren attempted to improve his retina repair surgical outcomes [1]. He discovered that suturing the retina or pressing externally on the sclera were not...
A six-month-old child with facial dysmorphism is brought to the eye clinic with history of watery right eye since birth. How will you manage this child? Causes for watery eye in an infant 1. Overproduction of tears a. Infections b....
Keeping mucormycosis infection in the foreground of your differential diagnosis, especially in those more vulnerable patients, will help save their lives if recognised and managed appropriately. Mucormycosis is a fulminant infection caused by the fungi of the family Mucoraceae. It...
Recent years have seen a huge increase in our understanding of the genetic factors underlying a wide variety of eye diseases. This has included common conditions such as glaucoma and age-related macular degeneration, as well as those conditions which have...
Advances in treatment for retinal diseases involving neovascularisation have undoubtedly changed the future of eye care across the UK for the better, but also created great challenges for service delivery in ophthalmology, particularly within the NHS. Some statistics are starting...