Eye Basics 101 - Ophthalmology and Optometry Review

In this episode, we discuss the basic eye anatomy of the globe. Topics include:

• tear film (3 layers)
• cornea (5 layers)
• anterior chamber
• iris
• lens (three layers)
• ciliary body
• vitreous
• retina (with layers)
• optic nerve

I could have gone into the external eye anatomy (lids, orbit, etc.) but thought that would be too much for one show. You can subscribe to this podcast using iTunes ... just search for “Eye Basics” in the iTunes store, or go directly to the podcast page here.

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Show Outline (transcript coming soon ... comments below)

TAG:
This is Eye Basics 101, Episode 2: Eye Anatomy

BUMPER:
In a world without good eye education, a beacon of hope is born. That beacon is Eye Talk Radio.

INTRO:
Welcome to Eye Basics 101. This is an audio program dedicated to teaching you about the eye and ocular disease. No matter if you are a student, a practicing doctor ... or just a curious person wanting to learn more about the eye... we can all learn through thoughtful discussion.

BIO:
I’m Dr. Timothy Root ... general ophthalmologist and cataract surgeon.

– You can find this show at EyeTalkRadio.com

– Questions or Comments about today’s discussion ... visit the show notes at:

EyeBasics101.com ... and look for episode 2

TODAYS TOPIC:
Eye Anatomy ... specifically the anatomy of the eyebal itself. We’re not going to be talking about the orbital, bone, or eyelid anatomy, as I think that much anatomy would be overwhelming to hear all at once.

ANATOMY CAN BE CHALLENGING

– I struggled with this in medical school

– Language ... just like Spanish, German, French ... you need fundamental building blocks before you can get big picture

– without learning the relevance to real-life disease makes it hard to memorize underlying anatomy first

WHEN I LEARED THIS STUFF

I was in medical school in the late 90s ...

– Learned most of my knowledge through a Netter Atlas and a borrowed skull model (I couldn’t afford my own) and gross anatomy

– internet wasn’t in existance yet ...

... yahoo was the dominant search engine

... youtube wasn’t around yet

... everyone was viewing tiny streaming videos using the aweful realplayer codec

... weren’t any good anatomy sites around

ANATOMY PROFESSORS WERE TRYING

– anatomy professor ... digital book on floppy disk. Not terrible but dense and unintuitive

– another one was experimenting with quicktime VR objects

– mid 90’s format for creating panoramas and spinning objects

– pelvis bone ... one of the things that peeked my interest in new media education

– gross anatomy disgusting and unhelpful for many systems (like the eye)

– eyeballs were deflated, sunken in, gross

Good NEWS: THINGS ARE BETTER NOW!

– Technology has improved quite a bit

... Youtube videos

... 3D models ... download it wirelessly to your ipad

– will cadavers really be necessary?

– brings us to this episode! I’ve already put several anatomy videos up on youtube, but today we’re going to try the “spoken word” to learn this material.

MORE GOOD NEWS: GETS EVEN BETTER!

– Eye anatomy (compared to weird structures like the kidney’s) is pretty straightforward

– Stable Field ... occasional advances and new body parts “discovered” ... but generally, the knowledge from 40 years ago is still applicable today.

– Hopefully, today’s discussion still applicable 40 years from now

– The same can’t be said of the treatment of glaucoma, cataracts, and refractive surgery

WAYS TO APPROACH ANATOMY

1. Systemic Approach (muscular, nervous, circulatory)

2. Location (prefer ... closer to how we examine the eye)

3. Disease approach ... how things relate to ocular diseases we treat

Mix things up a little bit. This will be a rambling discourse, will review pertinant anatomy in future episodes as they relate to the eye diseases we are looking at.

THE EYE

– No self-respecting eye doctoar calls the eye the eye “ball” ... it’s a “globe”

– With the exception of the brain, most complex organ in the body ...

– high level sensory component ... with over 100 million rods/cones cells

– clear crystaline structures

– combination of voluntary and involuntary muscles

– the most powerful sensory organ, with a third of the brain d...

This is the first episode of this program, so I’m still putting things together. You can listen to the show with the links above. I’m having the episode transcribed, but this will take a few days. in the meantime, I’ve copied my show outline below in case you want to read it while listening.

Also, you can subscribe to this podcast using iTunes ... just search for “Eye Basics” in the iTunes store, or go directly to the podcast page here.

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Show Transcript (comments below)

This is Eye Basics 101 Episode 1: The Basic Eye Exam

In a world without good eye education, a beacon of hope was born. That beacon is Eye Talk Radio

Welcome to Eye Basics 101. This is an audio program dedicated to teaching you about the eye and ocular disease. No matter if you are a student, a practicing doctor or just a curious person wanting to learn more about the eye, we can all learn more with thoughtful discussion. My name is Dr. Timothy Root, I’m a general ophthalmologist and cataract surgeon. The show notes for this episode are available at eyetalkradio.com, that’s E-Y-E eyetalkradio.com. If you have questions or comments about today’s discussion, just visit the show notes. You can also find it directly at Eyebasics101.com. Just look for episode 1 and leave a comment if you have one.

Today’s topic is the basic eye exam. Now, sight is arguably the most important sense for both survival and quality of life. The eye exam is quite different than a medicine exam. If you are a medical student or practicing doctor, much of your training to this point has probably involved a basic whole body exam. The eye is quite different.

For one thing, it’s much smaller, the eyes are only about one inch in diameter. It’s one of the smallest organs we can actually examine but there is a lot to see. And the reason why is the cornea, that clear window on the front of the eye lets us look inside the eye, so a lot to examine, a lot to document and it’s all crammed into a tiny space.

But before we get going on the basic eye exam, I wanted to spend a little bit of time talking about the motivation behind this program and why are we doing with this. When I was an ophthalmology resident, I had a great fortune of spending a good month up in New York City rotating with a neuro-ophthalmologist. During that time, I had to do quite a lot of self-study to try to understand a very confusing topic, neuro-ophthalmology is one of the more difficult sub-specialties to comprehend.

I found a series of audio lectures recorded by the great neuro-ophthalmologist J. Lawton Smith back in the 70s. They were online so they put them up in a novel website and I downloaded all the mp3s and loaded them on my mp3 player. As I commute around the city, I would listen to this lectures and they were pretty dense. Neuro-ophthalmology, talking about neuro anatomy in an audio format was quite challenging but I did find the experience extremely enlightening and very educational for me. I really enjoyed listening to these lectures and hear Dr. Smith talk to me right into my ears. It was quite moving.

I don’t know if you have ever had any familiar idea with J. Lawton Smith. He died a couple of years ago but he was one of the great neuro-ophthalmologists of the past 50 years. He worked down at Bascom Palmer down in Miami, Florida but he was from South Carolina and he was famous for his teaching style and partly because he just had a really interesting way of speaking, had an extremely dense Southern Carolina accent and he would say things like, pure as Ivory soap and you’re a rube and all these crazy Southern Carolina backward sayings. It’s really funny, it’s strange it can’t come with such an accent and such a great intellect. I found the entire experience very interesting, the audio was fantastic.

I enjoyed the dialogue, I think it made me a better doctor. I’m not saying I’m a J. Lawton Smith, that’s for darn sure, but I did find the experience listening to the audio while walking around quite good because reality is, I do a lot of videos. If you have ever seen my videos online, I do a lot of online video lectures, you’ll find them on YouTube. But people only have so much screen time, so much time where they’re sitting in front of the computer screen or looking on their phone or doing that type of stuff because life is busy. I’m hoping that by putting this in an audio format, it will be portable, you will be able to listen to it while driving around, walking around, cleaning the house doing chores and also maybe a little bit more personal because I can spend a little bit more time talking to you.

There’s also some selfish reasons behind this whole audio endeavor because the preparation time is much less. I put together a video lecture, I try to do a good job and it takes me months to put to...