Bausch & Lomb is an American-Canadian eye health products company based in Vaughan, Ontario, Canada. It is one of the world's largest suppliers of contact lenses, lens care products, pharmaceuticals, intraocular lenses, and other eye surgery products. The company was founded in Rochester, New York, in 1853 by optician John Bausch and cabinet maker turned financial backer Henry Lomb. Until its sale in 2013, Bausch + Lomb was one of the oldest continually operating companies in the United States.
A cataract is a cloudy area in the lens of the eye that leads to a decrease in vision of the eye. Cataracts often develop slowly and can affect one or both eyes. Symptoms may include faded colours, blurry or double vision, halos around light, trouble with bright lights, and difficulty seeing at night. This may result in trouble driving, reading, or recognizing faces. Poor vision caused by cataracts may also result in an increased risk of falling and depression. Cataracts cause 51% of all cases of blindness and 33% of visual impairment worldwide.
Far-sightedness, also known as long-sightedness, hypermetropia, and hyperopia, is a condition of the eye where distant objects are seen clearly but near objects appear blurred. This blur is due to incoming light being focused behind, instead of on, the retina due to insufficient accommodation by the lens. Minor hypermetropia in young patients is usually corrected by their accommodation, without any defects in vision. But, due to this accommodative effort for distant vision, people may complain of eye strain during prolonged reading. If the hypermetropia is high, there will be defective vision for both distance and near. People may also experience accommodative dysfunction, binocular dysfunction, amblyopia, and strabismus. Newborns are almost invariably hypermetropic, but it gradually decreases as the newborn gets older.
LASIK or Lasik, commonly referred to as laser eye surgery or laser vision correction, is a type of refractive surgery for the correction of myopia, hyperopia, and astigmatism. LASIK surgery is performed by an ophthalmologist who uses a femtosecond laser or a microkeratome to create a corneal flap to expose the corneal stroma and then an excimer laser to reshape the corneal stroma in order to improve visual acuity.
Eye surgery, also known as ophthalmic surgery or ocular surgery, is surgery performed on the eye or its adnexa. Eye surgery is part of ophthalmology and is performed by an ophthalmologist or eye surgeon. The eye is a fragile organ, and requires due care before, during, and after a surgical procedure to minimize or prevent further damage. An eye surgeon is responsible for selecting the appropriate surgical procedure for the patient, and for taking the necessary safety precautions. Mentions of eye surgery can be found in several ancient texts dating back as early as 1800 BC, with cataract treatment starting in the fifth century BC. It continues to be a widely practiced class of surgery, with various techniques having been developed for treating eye problems.
Radial keratotomy (RK) is a refractive surgical procedure to correct myopia (nearsightedness). It was developed in 1974 by Svyatoslav Fyodorov, a Russian ophthalmologist. It has been largely supplanted by newer, more accurate operations, such as photorefractive keratectomy, LASIK, Epi-LASIK and the phakic intraocular lens.
Refractive surgery is an optional eye surgery used to improve the refractive state of the eye and decrease or eliminate dependency on glasses or contact lenses. This can include various methods of surgical remodeling of the cornea (keratomileusis), lens implantation or lens replacement. The most common methods today use excimer lasers to reshape the curvature of the cornea. Refractive eye surgeries are used to treat common vision disorders such as myopia, hyperopia, presbyopia and astigmatism.
Phacoemulsification is a cataract surgery method in which the internal lens of the eye which has developed a cataract is emulsified with the tip of an ultrasonic handpiece and aspirated from the eye. Aspirated fluids are replaced with irrigation of balanced salt solution to maintain the volume of the anterior chamber during the procedure. This procedure minimises the incision size and reduces the recovery time and risk of surgery-induced astigmatism.
An intraocular lens (IOL) is a lens implanted in the eye usually as part of a treatment for cataracts or for correcting other vision problems such as short sightedness and long sightedness; a form of refractive surgery. If the natural lens is left in the eye, the IOL is known as phakic, otherwise it is a pseudophakic lens. Both kinds of IOLs are designed to provide the same light-focusing function as the natural crystalline lens. This can be an alternative to LASIK, but LASIK is not an alternative to an IOL for treatment of cataracts.
A phakic intraocular lens (PIOL) is an intraocular lens that is implanted surgically into the eye to correct refractive errors without removing the natural lens. Intraocular lenses that are implanted into eyes after the eye's natural lens has been removed during cataract surgery are known as pseudophakic.
Cataract surgery, also called lens replacement surgery, is the removal of the natural lens of the eye that has developed a cataract, an opaque or cloudy area. The eye's natural lens is usually replaced with an artificial intraocular lens (IOL) implant.
IntraLase was a company based in Irvine, California, producing lasers for the medical industry and for eye surgery.
Vision of humans and other organisms depends on several organs such as the lens of the eye, and any vision correcting devices, which use optics to focus the image.
Laser blended vision is a laser eye treatment which is used to treat presbyopia or other age-related eye conditions. It can be used to help people that simply need reading glasses, and also those who have started to need bifocal or varifocal spectacle correction due to ageing changes in the eye. It can be used for people who are also short-sighted (myopia) or long-sighted (hyperopia) and who also may have astigmatism.
Howard V. Gimbel FRCSC, AOE, FACS, CABES, is a Canadian ophthalmologist, university professor, senior editor, and amateur musician. He is better known for his invention, along with Thomas Neuhann, of the continuous curvilinear capsulorhexis (CCC), a technique employed in modern cataract surgery.
Raymond Mark Stein, MD, FRCSC, DABO, is a Canadian ophthalmologist. He practices refractive and cataract surgery. He is the medical director of the Bochner Eye Institute in Toronto, Ontario and Chief of Ophthalmology at the Scarborough General Hospital.
Keiki R. Mehta, an Indian ophthalmologist, medical researcher and writer, is considered by many as the father of Phacoemulsification in India. He is the Chief Surgical and Medical Director at Mehta International Eye Institute, a Mumbai-based specialty eye hospital founded by him. He is known to be the first surgeon to perform a Radial keratotomy in India and is credited with the development of the first soft eye implant in the world, and the Keiki Mehta BP Valve Glaucoma Shunt, a medical implant used in the treatment of neovascular‚ congenital and uveitic glaucoma. He is a recipient of several honours including the Grand Honors Award of the National Eye Research Foundation, Chicago and the Triple Ribbon Award of the American Society for Cataract and Refractive Surgery. The Government of India awarded him the fourth highest civilian honour of the Padma Shri, in 2008, for his contributions to Medicine.
Burkhard Dick is a German ophthalmologist who has specialized in refractive and cataract surgery. With his many contributions to the scientific literature on this topic, he is considered one of the pioneers of employing the femtosecond laser in cataract surgery. In the "Power List 2024" by the publication The Ophthalmologist, Burkhard Dick was listed among the world's most 100 most influential ophthalmologists.
Herbert Edward Kaufman is an American ophthalmologist who discovered idoxuridine, the first clinically useful antiviral agent; co-developed with William Bourne the clinical specular microscope to view the live corneal endothelium, co-developed timolol with Thomas Zimmerman, a new class of medications to treat glaucoma; corneal storage media for eye banks; natamycin, the first commercially available medication to treat fungal infections of the eye; co-developed with Tony Gasset the use of bandage contact lenses; and was involved in the first laser vision photorefractive keratectomy of the eye with Marguarite McDonald.
Clear lens extraction, also known as refractive lensectomy, custom lens replacement or refractive lens exchange is a surgical procedure in which clear lens of the human eye is removed. Unlike cataract surgery, where cloudy lens is removed to treat cataract, clear lens extraction is done to surgically correct refractive errors such as high myopia. It can also be done in hyperopic or presbyopic patients who wish to have a multifocal IOL implanted to avoid wearing glasses. It is also used as a treatment for diseases such as angle closure glaucoma.
