February 2014

This Month in Business

Alimera and Allergan benefit from new FDA approvals, Allergan continues to battle Valeant, and Oculentis sues Lenstec over IOL patent infringement

World Travel for a Write up of Your Work

The Ophthalmologist Travel Award represents a great opportunity: the chance of a free trip to the AAO 2014 congress in Chicago – flights, accommodation, and congress registration fees, in return for a chronic DME case study.

How to Build a World-Class Eye Institute

At the age of 39, I left a satisfying career in the United States to follow a dream of building a world-class eye institute in my native India. Here’s how the adventure has unfolded over the last 28 years, and some of what I learned along the way.

Inkjet Interventions

Can you envisage a future in which deploying a tiny cell-spraying device during vitreoretinal surgery reverses years of retinal cell death? Keith Martin can.

Cataract Benchmarking

You can’t predict the future, but a lot can be learned by analyzing what happened in the past.

Turning Dreams into Reality

Educational Excellence – For Patients

Electronic patient education systems look great, offer flexibility in what’s communicated and can be branded with your logo. Goodbye textbooks!

Premium Practice Promotion

Realizing the full potential of your cataract/ refractive practice starts with marketing… but it doesn’t stop there. Patient engagement and education, before, during and after the procedure is what produces results – and referrals.

Great Expectations Fuel IOL Inclinations

Cataract surgery and IOL implantation have come a long way since the 1990s, and it appears that technical innovations are stoking demand more than medical need.

Don’t Fear the Posterior Capsule

Why we need a rethink of the surgical approach to the barrier between the anterior and posterior lens segments

The Perfect Anterior Capsulorhexis

Getting the right shape and right size for optimal optical outcomes

Ophthalmologists are Healthy, Wealthy and Wise

Medscape assessed the lifestyles of physicians; of the twenty-six specialties covered, ophthalmologists have the most to boast about.

Ranibizumab Reality Bites

In the UK, real-world visual outcomes of patients receiving ranibizumab for neovascular AMD fail to match those achieved in most randomized trials. But they were delivered with substantially fewer injections and hospital visits.

Questioning the “Critical Period”

Received wisdom says that there is a critical period after birth during which the brain is wired for sight; blindness then means blindness for life. But a new study challenges this wisdom by demonstrating that congenitally blind children up to the age of 15 years can experience substantial vision gains.

Google’s Glucose Gadget

Google is developing contact lenses that will help patients monitor their glucose status. The technology is not entirely new, but the company’s infrastructure, experience and muscle suggest that it could have a substantial medical and commercial impact.

STAP in the Name of Love

An unexpected and simple advance has made stem cell production much easier and safer. Do STAP stem cells bring the treatment, even cure, of ocular disease a lot closer?

The Philanthropic Ophthalmologist

Be it battling blindness one patient at a time or changing global healthcare policies, ophthalmologists demonstrate admirable altruism.