Trying new things for you to enjoy on the blog. Featured today, news!
Get ready for: Vision implantable contact lenses, new drugs approved to be injected into the eye, heavy lifting linked to retinal detachment, new pills for diabetics with eyesight problems, and polar bears as the possible cause of ice berg accidents.
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Imagine you owned the Titanic. It sank. Bad scene. So you call a meeting, the finest engineers, all in your office. You ask the obvious question. What do we do to prevent this from happening again? The engineers look at each other and turn to you. They are all in agreement. Sir, we need to make more-better lifeboats.
More-better lifeboat engineers. Mainstream optometry (and ophthalmology for the most part).
(ICL) Implanting A Lens In Your Eyeball
If you don’t qualify for LASIK surgery (lucky you), you can instead possibly have a contact lens surgically implanted in your eye (not so lucky you). Because lifeboat engineering can answer the most unasked of questions. I call this news since it was in the newspaper, though you might as well call it an ad. Written by optometrist Zack Steele, it tells you all about the benefits of having a contact lens stuck inside your eyeball. Here, if you want to.
Just as a little extra incentive to get you to start thinking about taking care of your eyesight before that iceberg, here we have a bit of a visual of what awaits you with a contact lens implant.
Pretty, yea? The 19th century ice pick medical establishment would be green with envy.
A New $8,000 Treatment For Macular Edema
Diabetes has experienced a similarly troubling increase in modern society as myopia. And of course just like myopia, the establishment has gotten not busy with rooting out the cause. Since illness is just another thing that can be solved with capitalism, medicine has instead busied itself with treating symptoms.
Profitably.
“29 million Americans suffer from diabetes, and six million of them have vision related problems, often leading to blindness. The most common of those conditions is Diabetic Macular Edema, which causes inflammation, fluid buildup around the eye and poor to negligible vision. The FDA has approved a new drug treatment called Iluvien. It could mean less doctors visits, greater vision improvement and hope for patients spread across Central Texas.”
The treatment costs $8000, may or may not work, and is good for 2-3 years.
Indeed, things like this may give hope to those who are living in the unfortunate reality of already being far down the road of neglected health. And we will never get to the point of dealing with causality, as long as illness is a profit center for corporate interests.
Source: Iluvien and diabetic macular edema
Lifting & Retinal Detachment & $1.4 Million
In the latest research on how icebergs may be caused by migrations of the scourge know as the polar bear (and our title shot), here is this gem on possible causes of retinal detachment:
“A four-year study funded by a $1.4 million grant from NIOSH will examine the connection between heavy physical activities and retinal detachment, which occurs when the retina pulls away from its nourishing layer of blood vessels, resulting in potential vision loss.
The team of a half-dozen researchers from the University of Massachusetts-Lowell and Reliant Medical Group in Worcester, MA, intend to gather data from 200 cases in a larger and more detailed study than 2008 research from the University of Bologna, Italy, that associated heavy occupational lifting with risk of retinal detachment.”
Four years, a 1.4 million dollar grant. To see whether lifting heavy things will cause your retina to pop loose from your eyeball. I’m about to have a retinal detachment from reading news.
Also Alex, you were in entirely the wrong business.
Let’s put that in perspective, with a totally different study. The American Journal of Epidemiology and their oddball bit of research, “Risk factors for idiopathic rhegmatogenous retinal detachment” All the way back from April 1993.
What about those nerds without 1.4 million dollars in funding, and their obviously far fetched theories of myopia being the number one cause of retinal detachment? Their study showed eyes with mild myopia had a four-fold increased risk of retinal detachment compared with non-myopic eyes. Among eyes with moderate and high myopia, the risk increased 10-fold.
The study authors also concluded that almost 55 percent of retinal detachments not caused by trauma are attributable to myopia.
Not the way to get million dollar grants, guys, pointing fingers at myopia. Myopia pays the bills.
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Do we like eyesight related news? The best way to get things to become recurring here, is … comments.
Let me know if you enjoy these sort of articles, and we’ll have more. And of course, feel free to contribute your own iceberg sightings and lifeboat engineering feats.
