Archive for March of 2010
Clinical case: retinal detachment?
March 27, 2010
This past Thursday, a 62 year old African American patient walked into the clinic for a routine eye exam. He had no ocular/visual complaints and just wanted an update on his glasses. As I was examining the patient, everything went totally fine; his anterior segment looked totally normal with slit lamp, intraocular pressures normal, and the posterior pole was flawless. Then, during BIO, I was scanning away and next thing you know, I find this whitish tissue that was flapping in the temporal area of the patient's right eye!
Turf wars and optometry licensing
March 20, 2010
As some of you may already know, the profession of optometry in the United States is considered a "legislated profession." This means that all the privileges allowed for ODs are limited only to the extent of law. This is in contrast to MDs, which can practice medicine to its fullest extent (well, there should really be an asterisk here because although a cardiologist can technically/legally do something outside their scope like foot surgery, they will get sued if they mess up and that's why you go through residencies/fellowships to specialize in different areas of medicine).
Clinical Case: Solar retinopathy
March 07, 2010
Sorry it's been a while with updating the blog - as I mentioned in a previous entry I am getting married to my girlfriend of over seven years this coming June and we've been busy with wedding stuff, on top of many other family things. So anyway, this past Thursday I saw a very interesting case that I couldn't quite figure out right away. A 56 year old African American male came in for a routine eye exam with no visual or ocular complaints. During the exam, I refracted the patient and was able to get him to see 20/25, no improvement on pinhole. By the way, if a patient improves in acuity when you place a pinhole in front of their eye, that means that there's a potential error in the refraction. But if there is no improvement, then that means the patient has something that is physically impeding their vision e.g. a cataract, damage to the macula, or a central corneal opacity to name a few. So during the dilated fundus exam, I saw something very similar to this below:
Source
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