Archive for the ‘Eye Care Information’ Category

Many people suffer from eye care problems, and although prescription medications can be very beneficial, they are definitely not the only available option. Today many people are seeking non-prescriptive natural therapies and there are a number of natural healing eye products and exercises that can be put in place to assist you with your eye care.

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Research has shown that exercising your eyes reduces the risk of developing severe form of age-related eye trouble by almost 70%. That is a pretty positive number for such a simple task. These following eye exercises will strengthen your eye muscles and counterbalance the harmful effects of eyestrain.

Popularity: 2% [?]

Wearing sunglasses during summers protects your eyes from harmful Ultra Violet (UV) radiations, it’s just like wearing a seatbelt to protect from accidents. You always need to wear sunglasses which have ultraviolet protection when going out in sun.

Popularity: 6% [?]

Tired of Wearing Glasses and Contacts? Read This Article For 5 Powerful Exercises That Will Increase Your Eyesight!

Popularity: 5% [?]

Most patients that I see in my practice really don’t clearly understand what a Cataract is. I will attempt to explain this in a “user Friendly way”

Popularity: 4% [?]

The eyes are a function of blood, nutrients. Blood, nutrients build, fuel and cleanse the eyes. The eyes have muscles, lenses, humors, fluids, etc. that catch and focus light, images on the retina, which are then interpreted by the brain. The retina is attached to the brain via the optic nerve. Farsightedness, nearsightedness, blurry vision, spots in the visual field, cataracts, etc. are common eyes problems that are many time caused by poor diet, and many times can be cured by proper diet, herbs, depending on severity.

RALEIGH, N.C. –Millions of Americans have undergone laser eye surgery to correct bad vision, and along with the procedure’s popularity something else is coming into focus: its hazards.

Advertising stresses the surgery’s safety, and most procedures are successful. Tiger Woods, who relies on keen eyesight as the world’s best golfer, pitches it as a quick and painless way to restore sharp vision. Even the U.S. Air Force, long skeptical of the surgery, changed its policy last May to let people who had LASIK apply for pilot training.

But every year thousands of Americans who undergo LASIK are left with chronic pain, dryness of the eyes, distorted night vision and even blindness, according to Food and Drug Administration statistics.

LASIK, which stands for laser-assisted in situ keratomileusis, uses lasers to cut and reshape the cornea. It can improve eyesight without complications, but equipment flaws, a surgeon’s error or a failure to screen out patients whose eyes are ill-suited for the treatment can cause the operation to go awry.

The American Society of Cataract and Refractive Surgery, which represents about 9,000 ophthalmologists specializing in laser eye surgery, estimates that only 2 percent to 3 percent of the more than 1 million LASIK surgeries each year are unsuccessful. But FDA records of clinical studies show that six months after the surgery, up to 28 percent of patients complained of eye dryness, up to 16 percent had blurry vision and up to 18 percent had difficulty driving at night.

The Triangle, home to two medical schools, is a hot spot for LASIK, where 11 eye centers will perform LASIK on about 8,000 patients this year, according to market research.

One of the leaders is Duke Eye Center, whose LASIK surgeons are among the best-trained and best-equipped in the field. But even surgery at Duke’s level has damaged a few patients’ eyes beyond repair.

One of those patients is Matthew Kotsovolos, 38, of Raleigh. He had more reason than most patients to feel confident about undergoing LASIK. He was the Duke Eye Center’s head of finances. As an employee, he said, he was promised “red carpet treatment” and the procedure would be free.

The surgery June 8, 2006, gave him 20-20 vision, but it left him with intensely dry eyes and excruciating facial pain. He wakes up with sore eyes every morning, puts on special goggles to preserve eye moisture and wonders when the pain in his face will start to kick in.

“I traded in my glasses for permanent head pain, eye pain and these things,” Kotsovolos said, pointing to the goggles.

Nine months after his surgery, Kotsovolos quit his job at the Duke Eye Center, took a 25 percent pay cut and started work as business manager in the Duke University Medical Center’s gastroenterology division. He is organizing a support group for LASIK patients with complications.

“It may help inform people that this is a surgery with real risks that are understated by LASIK surgeons,” Kotsovolos said.

How many LASIK patients develop post-surgery complications is obscured by a lack of regulation and reporting. Because health insurers don’t pay for LASIK, they generally don’t track complications. The Food and Drug Administration doesn’t require reports from doctors, and regulatory enforcement has been largely limited to recalling malfunctioning lasers.

Evidence of problems is accumulating. Some of the strongest is the growing market for contact lenses designed for people who have undergone LASIK and still have vision problems, some seeing worse than before the surgery. One of the leading post-LASIK lens makers is MedLens Innovations, a Front Royal, Va., company founded in 2000.

Robert Breece, an optometrist and MedLens’ president, said his company provides hard contacts to more than 2,500 post-LASIK patients annually and business is increasing about 10 percent every year. Breece said his company serves more than 200 people per year who have been seriously disabled by the surgery.

“I don’t get to talk to happy LASIK patients,” he said.

By the end of the year, SynergEyes of Carlsbad, Calif., plans to bring to market the first line of contact lenses designed specially for laser eye surgery patients with complications who cannot tolerate hard lenses.

Patients with complications are starting to fight back on the Internet and through support groups. Medical research in the past three years has come up with insights about LASIK worrisome enough that some eye surgeons have begun to ease away from the procedure.

“We’ve learned the limitations of LASIK,” said Dr. Stephen Pflugfelder, professor of ophthalmology at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas.

An expert in laser eye surgery for more than 15 years, Pflugfelder is increasingly falling back on an older, less invasive procedure known as photorefractive keratectomy, or PRK, which involves only the surface of the eye.

In the past three years, the number of LASIK procedures at Baylor has dropped from about 70 percent to about 50 percent of all laser eye surgeries.

At Duke, LASIK makes up about 80 percent of all laser eye surgeries. Dr. Alan Carlson, head of the Duke Eye Center, is comfortable with that.

“Dry eye hasn’t been a big problem,” Carlson said.

The university buys the most sophisticated lasers on the market, he said. Patients are screened for risk factors and informed of what they can and cannot expect from LASIK. A surgeon might even do LASIK on one eye at a time.

Those precautions did not prevent Lauranell Burch, a former Duke medical researcher, from suffering serious complications after undergoing LASIK at the Duke Eye Center.

Burch, 47, said that since the surgery March 31, 2004, her eyes sting and burn all the time, eye tissue is wrinkled like a Ruffles potato chip and her night vision is distorted.

“(The damage) is noticeable and on the front of your mind all your waking hours,” Burch said. “There’s no escape.”

Burch cut short her follow-up treatment at Duke, became an avid patients’ advocate and started to take on LASIK surgeons on Internet Web sites.

Federal privacy laws prohibit Carlson from speaking about an individual patient’s case. But the head of the Duke Eye Center acknowledged that LASIK can cause serious complications.

“It’s imperfect surgery in an imperfect world,” he said.

Popularity: 11% [?]

Toronto  
Herzig Eye Institute Offers Baby Boomers Custom Solutions. Industry Leaders Introduce Innovative NearVision CK Procedure.

A natural part of aging, people over the age of 40 begin to develop presbyopia and they start to have difficulty reading a menu, newspaper, computer, and other close-up objects. Until recently, reading glasses, bifocals, or multifocal lenses were the only solutions. On the cutting edge of technology, the Herzig Eye Institute offers baby boomers a number of effective alternatives and more permanent options for the treatment of presbyopia, including the innovative new NearVision CK, Monovision LASIK, the Refractive Lens Exchange and the Implantable Contact Lens (ICL).

“Presbyopia affects everyone over 40, whether they have had perfect vision all their life or have undergone laser eye surgery to achieve perfect vision,” states Dr. Sheldon Herzig, Medical Director, Herzig Eye Institute. “As the body ages, the natural lens of the eye loses part of its elasticity and presbyopia, the loss of reading vision, begins to develop. At the Herzig Eye Institute there are a number of options for patients to correct presbyopia. We consult with each patient to determine the best option for them.”

Introducing NearVision CK

Leading pioneers in vision correction, the Herzig Eye Institute introduces the innovative new NearVision CK procedure for the treatment of presbyopia.

“For patients over 45 who have good distance vision in both eyes either naturally or as a result of previous laser surgery or cataract extraction, we have introduced a new procedure called NearVision CK,” says Dr. Herzig.

NearVision CK is a non-laser, no incision, and no tissue removal radio frequency (RF) energy that reshapes the cornea to adjust its refractive attributes to bring near vision back into focus. A small pen shaped instrument with a Keroplast Tip that emits controlled RF is inserted around the cornea in a circular pattern that shrinks collagen and makes the cornea steeper. Studies show that the depth of shrinkage determines the degree of corneal correction. The circular treatment tightens the cornea, increasing its curvature, thereby giving better near vision.

The best candidates for NearVision CK are:
45 years or older
See well at distance (without glasses or contacts)
Are tired of wearing reading glasses or magnifiers for all near vision tasks
Post LASIK patients that had LASIK over one year ago
Post cataract patients that want less dependence on reading glasses

When 58 year-old Toronto-based actor and roofer David Baughn heard about NearVision CK he decided that it might be the solution he was looking for. After consulting with Dr. Herzig and discovering that he was a candidate for the procedure, he recently underwent NearVision CK at the Herzig Eye Institute.

“I had perfect vision when I was younger and heard there was a new procedure that could allow me to get rid of my reading glasses,” states David Baughn. “NearVision CK was quick and painless. Now when I am in an audition and am given a script, I no longer have to go hunting for my glasses.”

Plumber Henry Kay, 59, underwent NearVision CK as a follow-up to the LASIK procedure he had 7 years ago.

“I knew I would still need reading glasses after I had my initial LASIK eye surgery, but I was sick of wearing them,” states Kay. “I was amazed at how fast a procedure NearVision CK was and that it was totally pain free. Within minutes I was reading fine print on prescription bottles.”

NearVision CK is typically performed on just one eye. It is a safe, fast, and an in-office treatment that is painless. Any discomfort subsides within 24 hours of the procedure and most people can return to work the next day. Patients will experience immediate improvement in vision after the procedure but the eye usually only adjusts to the final level of reading vision after several weeks.

NearVision CK is a temporary solution, as Presbyopia is a progressive condition and only the patient’s current needs can be treated with the procedure. Every patient is different and additional needs will increase as the eyes continue to age and more treatment may be required. NearVision CK can be performed up to three times on most patients with results lasting for one to three years.

Monovision LASIK

Traditional LASIK surgery frees the majority of patients from the need to wear glasses or contacts until they reach about forty and presbyopia sets in.  Monovision LASIK adjusts one eye to see things close up, while the other eye sees things farther away. The brain integrates the visual information from both eyes and adjusts either immediately or within a few weeks to having each eye focus at a different distance.

Refractive Lens Exchange (Clear Lens Extraction)

Used for patients with very high levels of nearsightedness, farsightedness and early lens opacities, Refractive Lens Exchange is the same procedure as modern cataract surgery, but can be performed before a cataract is detected.

Unlike laser vision correction, which alters the shape of the cornea, Refractive Lens Exchange changes the focusing power of the eye by removing the eye’s natural lens and replacing it with a better lens. In effect, the lens implant acts like a permanent contact lens within the eye, with newer lens designs offering both distance and reading vision.

At the beginning of the surgery, a small incision — less than an eighth of an inch, or 2.75 mm — is made in the periphery of the cornea. A delicate instrument is inserted through the incision to create a circular opening in the front of the lens capsule. A suction tip is then inserted, and the gel-like natural lens is removed and a lens implant is inserted into the lens capsule.

The Implantable Contact Lens (ICL™)

The Implantable Contact Lens is used for patients who are at least 18 years of age with high levels of myopia, hyperopia, or astigmatism that are too extreme for laser vision correction, and for whom laser vision correction on the cornea is not safe.

The ICL™ is a very thin intraocular lens that is inserted through a small 3 mm incision at the edge of the cornea. Unlike Refractive Lens Exchange, where an intraocular lens replaces the eye’s natural lens, the ICL™ is designed to rest in front of the eye’s natural lens, just behind the iris. The surgery typically takes 10 to 15 minutes to perform, with only one eye being treated at a time. The second eye is usually treated 1-7 days after the first eye.

About the Herzig Eye Institute

The Herzig Eye Institute has treated thousands of patients from across Canada, 42 US states and 23 countries worldwide. Dr. Herzig, a world-renowned expert in his field, is past president of the Canadian Society of Cataract and Refractive Surgeons and prepared the Recommended Safety Guidelines for Laser Refractive Centres in Canada. Herzig Eye Institute’s High Definition Vision ™ solutions utilize only the most advanced vision correction technology such as VISX Custom Vue ™ Wavefront-guided laser with Iris Registration technology, and Intralase® as well as other proven intraocular surgical procedures for patients who do not qualify for laser surgery. The Herzig Eye Institute also offers treatments for presbyopia including NearVision CK, Monovision LASIK, the Refractive Lens Exchange, the Implantable Contact Lens (ICL), as well as providing Advanced Cataract Solutions. The Herzig Eye Institute is the only custom vision correction surgical centre in North America to be awarded the prestigious ISO 9001 certification by SGS International Certification Services, Inc.

Contact:

Peter Ashworth/Ashley Lloyd
Ashworth Associates Inc.
ashworth.associates@sympatico.ca
416-603-6005

Popularity: 11% [?]

Wearing glasses has thus become so commonplace that if your friends make any comment on them, it is probably because you have changed your style of frames or have decided not to wear them at all. Most of us get so accustomed to our spectacles that we put them on and take them off with hardly a thought-unless they start slipping down our noses or steaming up.

Popularity: 3% [?]

Your eyes are at a constant risk from various disorders and unwanted appearances. Fortunately, you can solve most eye problems with proper eye care and nourishment.

Popularity: 3% [?]