Cataracts are a common disease in the elderly and are a sign of physiological degeneration, often leading to vision loss, blurring, and even double vision. However, there are still some misconceptions about when you should have surgery.
Myth 1: Cataracts can be cured by medication or other non-surgical treatments and surgery can be avoided. Older people often see from various authoritative newspapers or broadcasts all kinds of odd medicines or odd people made from valuable herbs for treating various eye diseases by tapping into the treasures of Chinese medicine. An important feature of these drugs is that they guarantee rapid improvement of vision after use, often with good feedback from many “users” and recommendations from “experts”. As a “non-toxic” herbal medicine, it can rejuvenate a cloudy lens and make it transparent again without the pain of surgery. Therefore, many elderly people will spend a lot of money to buy these “expensive Chinese medicine” made of various “cure for blindness pills”, “restorative medicine”, “bright eye patch The “eye patch” and so on. However, these drugs often fail to improve vision to avoid surgery, and even lead to further vision loss or even blindness due to allergies or other side effects.
Myth 2: Cataracts have to be mature before they can be done. This is a very old-fashioned, and even a bit harmful, statement. As cataract surgery lacked a clear operating microscope 20 or 30 years ago, most ophthalmologists still relied on magnification to do cataract surgery. If the cataract was immature, the entire clouded crystal cortex could not be seen and removed, so patients were required to have it done only after the cataract had matured. It is actually a sign of medical backwardness. With the popularization of surgical microscope and high-definition surgical microscope, ophthalmologists have been able to clearly see all the cloudy degree of crystal cortex, even the cortex of completely transparent crystal, so there is no longer any need to wait for the cataract to mature before doing it technically. And as the standard of living improves, the elderly are becoming more and more conscious of their quality of life. Waiting for cataract to mature will cause the elderly to spend a long period of low vision, which will not only cause inconvenience and quality of life, but also increase the burden on their children.
Myth 3: Cataract surgery requires vision to drop below 0.3 or 0.5. A perfect vision also includes good color vision, contrast sensitivity and aberration. What is contrast sensitivity? Simply put, it is the ability to distinguish between shades of gray. Because our world is not simply black and white, there are many shades of gray between the two, and the ability to distinguish between these different levels of “gray” is our contrast sensitivity. Therefore, many cataract patients have a good visual acuity of 0.6-0.8, but they always feel blurred and live in a serious haze, with plastic film or unclean eye droppings in front of their eyes. In fact, these are all signs of decreased contrast sensitivity. The most obvious effect of decreased contrast sensitivity in daily life is a decrease in the ability to distinguish between steps. This is also an important reason why the elderly often fall, unable to clearly distinguish a small number of steps in a large flat area, which can easily lead to a fall in the air and even lead to fractures. Therefore, cataract surgery should not be abandoned just because the vision chart “vision” is still good, but the contrast sensitivity, color vision and aberration should be considered. Especially for people with high requirements for fine vision, such as painters, designers and architects. Therefore, according to the evaluation of the comprehensive visual function and the degree of impact on the patient’s daily life, early surgery should be considered as appropriate.