Many elderly people come to the clinic and the first thing they ask is, “Doctor, can you see if I have cataracts? They are very nervous and waiting for my verdict. Whenever I encounter this situation, I am always in a difficult position. If I tell her that she has cataract, she will be so nervous that she can’t sleep or eat, or she will go to buy Saphras, which is recommended by Lang Ping, the national hero, to cure 100 kinds of eye diseases, and spend so much money for nothing. If the patient goes to another hospital and is diagnosed with cataract, she will think, “What kind of doctor can’t even see the cataract.
In fact, cataract is really not a big deal. People, no matter if they are illiterate people or dignitaries, will definitely get cataracts when they get old. Just like aging skin and graying hair, it is a natural
It’s a natural law, a metabolism that no one can resist. The difference between people is only the time of aging and the degree of severity.
For example, the skin, some people, forty years old, the skin aging like 50 or 60 years old, some people on the contrary.
Hair is also, some people 30 years old, the hair is white a large, some people 80 years old, the hair is still black, but you have to look carefully, in fact, there are still a lot of white hair mixed in it, not a white hair.
This cataract, is the same as the same reason. Some people, at the age of 40, have cloudy crystals and poor vision to 0.1, so they must have surgery. Some people, at the age of 80, are deaf and blind, but they do not have cataracts, but they are very light, so light that they are completely negligible.
Next, let’s go back to the root of the cataracts and talk about the history, causes and consequences.
As I said before, cataract is an aging lesion. Where is the aging? It is the crystal. What is the use of the crystal? The crystal is equivalent to a small mirror in the human eye. When you are young, this small mirror is elastic and transparent, but when you get old, this small mirror loses its elasticity, which is presbyopia, and it is not transparent anymore, which is cataract. It needs to be replaced with an artificial, transparent and even flexible mirror, or an IOL.
Some people ask, “Which is the best IOL, so expensive, from a few hundred dollars to more than 10,000 dollars a piece?
It’s very simple, the more expensive the better when conditions permit.
Of course, it does not mean that you have to spend all your money to get the most expensive one. Just like staying in a hotel or eating a big meal, 99.99% of the time, it’s all about how much money you spend and how much service you enjoy, the more expensive the better.
But no money, the budget is not much, there is really no need to go to install that the best. The minimum recommendation, no matter what brand of crystal is put, or at least put an imported one. The cheapest imported crystals, about 2000.
The last question is, when should cataract surgery be done? Does it have to wait until the cataract is mature?
It is a popular myth that cataracts can only be done when they are mature.
Why is there such a legend? I privately think that there are two reasons.
One is that the success rate of the surgery was low due to the low level of technology in the past, so when the cataract is ripe, we can do it afterwards. If the cataract is done well, the vision will be improved and we will make money. Nowadays, cataract surgery has entered the era of highly accurate microscopic surgery, which is calculated in millimeters, and it is no longer as uncertain as before, so we don’t need to wait until we can’t see before doing it.
The other is the change of surgical method. In the past, the more mature the cataract is, the harder the nucleus of the crystal is, and the easier it is to retrieve. Nowadays, more than 95% of cataract surgeries are performed with ultra-emulsion. What is ultrasound surgery? It is the use of an ultrasound probe to break up the nucleus of the cloudy crystal into powder or even celiac disease, and then suck out the crystal through a tiny incision of less than 3mm in the black eye, that is, the cornea. Once inside the eye, the folded lens with memory function will automatically pop open and prop up inside the eye to replace the cloudy lens that was removed. If the cataract is too mature, the harder the nucleus of the lens, the more energy it takes to break up the nucleus, which can cause the excess energy to spread to other parts of the eye and lead to complications that should not be there. If the nucleus is not so hard, one or two ultrasounds may be enough to break it up, and the less energy used, the less negative impact it will have on the eye, and the faster and better the postoperative recovery. Therefore, the timing of modern cataract surgery no longer depends on whether the cataract is mature or not, but mainly refers to the degree of impact on the patient’s life due to the vision loss caused by the cataract. People with high quality of life requirements, even with 0.5 or 0.6 vision, can be operated if the poor vision is indeed caused by cataracts.