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AAO 2012 Phoenix – Day 1: A nerd’s paradise

If you love eyes, AAO is like Nirvana. Is your chance to be as nerdy as you like about eyes and no one thinks you’re weird or boring!

I only made it to 4am before I was wide awake but fortunately had a 7.15am start with a breakfast meeting about contact lenses and happy patients. It was OK but I wasn’t inspired to be honest.

Things improved as the day took a decidedly geek turn with a whole hour devoted to the the vitreous humour (of course the Yanks spell it incorrectly). For those of you casting your mind back to A-Level biology the vitreous is clear the jelly like substance that fills most of the eye ball and is 99% water. How can you talk for an hour about a transparent bag of gel that’s 99% water I hear you ask? Well you can and it’s fascinating.

If any of you have experienced flashes and floaters then you may have had a PVD which we talked about in some detail. There is even hope for a new treatment for problems associated with PVD and a possible cure for floaters. This new wonder drug comes out in the US in 2013, so we’ll have to see how long it takes to come to the UK.

Then I had an excellent summary of the latest lenses for keratoconus. We’re pretty much at the leading edge of keratoconus in the UK and so there wasn’t too much new here but there are a couple of new designs coming out this year which sound quite exciting and now I know how to fit them, it should give us a running start when the arrive in the UK.

The afternoon was a bit of binocular vision (how the eyes work together as a pair) and a very interesting discussion of the value of OCT in Glaucoma and other optic nerve analysis. The OCT is scanner that we will have used on you if you’ve come in for an eye exam in the last year or 2.

I’m such a party animal I stayed up until 8pm before crashing out!

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