In this episode of the podcast, I talk to Dr. Brian Williams, a retina specialist from the University of Miami and a board-certified specialist in ophthalmology. Dr. Williams is the director of the Eye Institute of the University of Miami School of Medicine.
As a diabetic patient, you may have some retinal problems, especially if you’re hypertensive. The symptoms of diabetic retinopathy can include: blurred vision, vision loss, double vision, headaches, a drooping eyelid, and vision changes.
If you have any of these symptoms, you should see your doctor. While most of these symptoms have no impact on your daily life, they are important to know because they are what doctors can do to help you. For example, if you have blurred vision, a doctor can change the way your eyes look, or use ophthalmoscope to look at your eyes under a microscope.
The ophthalmoscope is a special instrument that allows the doctor to look at the inside of your eye. In fact, the ophthalmoscope is used in a lot of eye exams, but it’s also a camera that can take a picture of your eye. This is important because the doctor can take the picture of the inside of your eye and send it to the lab.
By using a special camera to take pictures of your eyes, your eye doctor can give you the appropriate treatment. For example, if you have diabetic retinopathy you might be prescribed laser eye surgery to reduce the blood flow to your eye. If you have diabetic retinopathy and you’re on your way to have laser eye surgery, your doctor can give you the appropriate warning so that you can go in and have surgery before you have retinopathy.
If you have diabetic retinopathy, you have a serious condition that puts you at an increased risk of eye disease. That means that you have a serious eye problem. It can also mean that you have a condition that puts you at a higher risk of developing kidney disease and cardiovascular disease.
Diabetic retinopathy is an eye disease whose symptoms include blurred vision, blindness, or difficulty seeing. The cause of the disease is a buildup of fluid and scarring in the retinal nerve cells, which makes them more sensitive to the damaging effects of the blood-sugar levels. So the treatment is usually to have fluid removed from the eye. Because of that it is not uncommon to have a problem before the disease even appears.
It turns out that in the current state of the art we can really only treat diabetic retinopathy with a combination of laser surgery and medication. However, the new state of the art technology might allow for a non-surgical treatment, allowing for a much lower risk of complications.
It’s a similar story for diabetes. The treatment is usually to have fluid removed from the eye. Because of that it is not uncommon to have a problem before the disease even appears.
So basically since diabetic retinopathy is most prevalent in diabetics, so the treatment is almost certain to be a non surgical one. I mean, we can’t say for certain, but at least we know there’s a problem, even though that’s all we can get from the FDA.