Nick Bruns, OD, FAAO, shares key insights on matching today’s intraocular lens options to each patient’s unique needs while recapping his American Optometric Association Meeting presentation.
Nick Bruns, OD, FAAO:
Hi, my name is Nick Bruns, [of] Summit Eye Care of Wisconsin. I just want to do a video recap of the lecture that we did at the American Optometric Association meeting in Phoenix. We did a lecture on the most common FAQs we hear with cataract surgery. My role is very, very heavily pre- and postop. I work almost exclusively with cataract patients, and cataract surgery is such a cool spot because there’s so many new things coming out. We get new lenses each and every year. We have new techniques that are coming out each and every year, sometimes each and every month, and I talked to our referral network here locally in Milwaukee and I get all these same questions all the time.
It’s really hard for general optometry, primary care optometry, to really keep up with all the updates that are coming out. That’s what we’re trying to really tackle with our lecture. What are the most common things we get?
The most common question I get is what is the best lens? What is the best lens out there? My response is almost always the same. That’s a ridiculous question. There are so many really cool lenses and it’s a ridiculous question because it’s like asking, which is the best shoe? We all have different preferences. We all have different needs and different lifestyles and there’s different reasons for us to buy a certain pair of shoes. Same with lenses. Lenses have different pros, different cons, and our patients all each have their own unique history, their own unique medical history and anatomy. We have to take those into consideration.
That was a big part of what we talked about. What considerations do we make when we talk to patients about specific lens implants? We also talked about lifestyle considerations and psychological considerations. Expectations are a big part of this process and a big part of the discussion. Are you a very active person? Do you like to ski? Do you like to golf? Do you like to snowboard, spend time outside, or do you rather knit? Do you drive at nighttime? Do you do things up close? Are you a piano player? These are all different tasks, things that individual patients need to consider and part of the discussion.
The other thing we talked about were the new lenses available. There’s the holy grail in the IOL world is the truly accommodative IOL. While we don’t exactly have that yet, we’re coming pretty darn close to getting that. The lenses that we have really do provide a solid depth of focus and mostly minimal compromised range of vision. That was really the highlight of the discussion, and it ended up being a really cool talk, and we’ll hopefully do this again next year. Thanks everybody.
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