Glaucoma : $b A symposium presented at a meeting of the Chicago Ophthalmological Society, November 17, 1913
Science
Glaucoma : $b A symposium presented at a meeting of the Chicago Ophthalmological Society, November 17, 1913
Glaucoma
instillations during the twenty-four hours of the number necessary to
maintain this myosis are on retiring and if possible in the very early
morning, some time between two and four o'clock. Most patients can be
taught to wake themselves at the proper period of time, and are little
inconvenienced by this disturbance of their sleep. I believe that eserin
irritation is most successfully avoided, not by preparations of the
myotics in combination with the antiseptics, for example, tricresol,
which has been so much advocated, but by ordering very small quantities
of the solution, insisting that it shall be frequently renewed and
sterilized at each preparation, and that a half an hour after its
instillation, during the day time at least, the eye shall be thoroughly
flushed with some mild antiseptic solution, for example, boric acid and
sodium chlorid. Whether the action of the eserin on the choroidal
circulation, which is maintained by Wahlfours, aids in this favorable
action of the myotics remains to be proved. It has been maintained by
this author and by others who have followed him.
The great trouble with myotic treatment is not its lack of efficiency,
but the difficulty of carrying it out successfully on ambulant
patients, even in the better walks of life. It is hard successfully to
maintain in a patient with chronic glaucoma what I may call an eserin
life, just as it is hard to maintain in a person with an enlarged
prostate a catheter life and escape infection, resulting, if it occurs,
in the one instance in a difficult and stubborn conjunctivitis, and in
the other in a cystitis. Still, we are obliged to use myotics, and the
way to employ them to the patients' best advantage, I have ventured to
repeat in spite of the universal familiarity with the methods. Perhaps
we may reach that happy day when, especially with improved tonometric
methods, increased skill in measuring the rate of filtration and better
instruments for determining the light sense, we can anticipate the
advent of glaucoma and get ahead of the ocular and visual deterioration
which increased tension produces, by performing preventive operations
which shall aid nature's filtration channels in the establishment of an
artificial one. But increased tension is not the whole story of
glaucoma, and a filtering cicatrix is not the last word in surgical
therapeutics, and there is much to learn.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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