1,490 karma · joined July 13, 2016
Endophthalmitis is bad, but we can treat it if caught promptly. Patient education, informed consent, good hygiene practices, and easy access to their ophthalmologist can make a tremendous difference.
Source: I do these injections for a living.
My philosophical take: if AI can outperform the average, it’s probably a net benefit for society that I won’t have a job. Until then, I’m going to take my income and save up for an early retirement.
They didn’t really demonstrate that patients without the implant had worse vision. You could argue that with the magnifying glasses themselves that patients could improve their vision without surgery. So it will be up to a future study to determine this.
95% success rate seems low. you need to define success in this scenario. Are we aiming for 20/20 vision outcomes? Just getting the cataract out in full?
The timeline for delayed immune reaction to a leptospirosis infection makes diagnosis incredibly difficult. There was no mention of an acute febrile illness preceding this during the patient's trip to the tropics, which I assume a uveitis specialist would ask.
While empiric treatment with doxycycline wouldn't be a bad idea, you have to decide what to empirically treat with, and for how long, and what the ramifications of increasing resistance to antibiotics are for society. Do I commit a patient to the hospital for two weeks of IV penicillin because I "suspect" syphilis? of course not.
Better diagnostics for these occult diseases should be applauded. But we shouldn't be vilifying the clinicians that are by all accounts doing their best.
I believe Microsoft And Sony lose money per console sold
Compare this to ~5% of cancer related death attributable to alcohol use.
It's just not even an accurate comparison.
To be honest though? I am willing to bet that cost to healthcare system for alcohol related illness is outpacing that of smoking related illness. Cirrhosis of the liver is a very costly disease when it gets close to end stage.
EDIT: also re corneal disease unless the treatment is a contact lens go to an ophthalmologist for that one too
The other option you have is some form of refractive surgery. Also the wholesale cost of a toric IOL is somewhere around $700 so unless the surgeon fee is thru the roof it shouldn’t be costing you $3k each eye.
Just thirty years ago you may have never even gotten an IOL due to tradition or cost. After adoption in the developed world there was a huge push to prevent lower income countries from accessing the technology because they “didn’t need” that technology and could benefit from lower cost interventions such as glasses.
So as companies started to innovate and lower cost, single vision non toric IOLs became cheap enough for insurance to cover. Then to make some money on premium lenses companies (and ophthalmologists, sadly) really started to push torics and multifocal lenses.
The fact of the matter is that few patients benefit all that much from toric lenses that fix astigmatism. Most people have less than 1 diopter of astigmatic error, which they don’t even manufacture a toric lens for at any usable tolerance (the FDA allows a +/-0.50D tolerance to all lenses including torics), and surgical modifications can nullify that to some extent. Veterans get it free at most VA hospitals though, so they probably get more implanted than the average population.
In the next fifteen years though I bet Medicare will begin to cover toric lenses, and the rest of the insurance industry will follow. The surgery doesn’t change much between toric and non toric. The Multifocal IOLs will remain “premium” for a while to come I expect.
But then again, all press is good press
Glaucoma is a disease where one slowly loses peripheral vision, until a small central island remains or you go completely blind.
So do patients perceive black peripheral vision? Or blurred peripheral vision?
Not really…patients actually make up the surrounding peripheral vision, sometimes with objects!
One might ask, where is this needed? In the US we actually probably have a surplus of donor corneas. However in other countries with less robust infrastructure this may fill a gap.
I don’t think it’s actually 13 million people but probably a big chunk of that group could benefit.