Spent all day yesterday in lectures at Toronto Retina Institute (TRI)‘s 4th annual Retina Symposium!
Loved hearing the inside baseball of what goes into treatment decisions for wet/dry AMD, diabetic retinopathy, retinal detachments, and get updates on inherited retinal diseases, pachychoroidopathies, eyelid surgery and more! Appreciated the opportunities to come together and share insights, and the day just flew by. 
Thanks TRI for hosting another great event! 
Your eye exam is not a scam. Glasses and contact lenses are medical devices.
When you notice a change in your vision, it can be caused by a host of other things. For example, Iāve seenā¦
– patients who were unaware that they had diabetes, but were diagnosed based on the appearance of the retina at the back of their eyes
– patients who didnāt know they had high blood pressure, but again were diagnosed after an eye exam
– a patient who thought she had dry eye, and was using drops suggested by the pharmacist, but it turned out to be an inflammatory eye condition linked with thyroid disease
– patients with retinal holes which required laser surgery to prevent retinal detachment
– 2 patients that came in for a routine exam, but ended up having an eye tumour š
On the less āscaryā side, Iāve seen plenty of people after they tried to order a higher powered contact lens themselves, thinking they needed something stronger, but they did it incorrectly and ended up giving themselves a headache. Or they ordered glasses online after modifying their glasses prescription a bit and couldnāt see out of the new ones. Iāve seen TONs of people with burning, itchy, red eyes who tried to self-medicate with over-the-counter antibiotic drops, which didnāt help. Do you really trust yourself to know what you need without going to the doctor? Your optometrist is not just a barrier to getting glassesā¦ weāre here to help you take care of your eyes and catch preventable causes of vision loss! š Eye exams might seem simple when everything is going well, but it takes years of training for me to rule out eye disease and other more sinister causes of a prescription change.
This author as simply upset because he was too unprepared to have spare glasses or contact lenses. If you use medication, itās your own responsibility to have a supply wherever you go. Itās NOT a local doctorās job to give it to you, sight unseen. Donāt be a statistic in preventable vision loss!
The main takeaway from this should be to make sure you always have a backup pair of glasses š¤
Yascha Mounk – It is very irresponsible to encourage people to risk their eye health like this
(This is a response to the article The Great American Eye-Exam Scam in the Atlantic )
A morning of education withĀ Uptown Eye Specialists on a chilly SundayĀ š¤Ā Luckily we went back an hour for daylight savings! #lifelonglearning
It would be very exciting if we could detect Alzheimer’s early before any symptoms with optical coherence tomography (OCT)! This is technology that we already have readily available in our office, as we use it to monitor other conditions such as glaucoma and macular degeneration. It’s much less invasive than the tests they currently use for Alzheimer’s.
Of course, much more studies are needed before any true link is established, but it really wouldn’t surprise me because we can already see lots of general health conditions in the eye such as diabetes, high blood pressure, and more! Your eyes truly are the window into your brain š¤#iloveeyes
Read more on Science Daily: Alzheimer’s May One Day Be Predicted During Eye Exam