Florida Eye Specialists in Jacksonville, FL, offers leading-edge glaucoma treatments designed to protect and preserve your vision. In this informative video, board-certified ophthalmologist and glaucoma specialist Dr. Kathryn Freidl discusses advanced options for glaucoma treatment, including medications, laser therapy, and minimally invasive glaucoma surgery (MIGS). You’ll gain insight into how these treatments work, what to expect during your glaucoma care journey, and how early intervention can help improve your quality of life.
As one of Northeast Florida’s top-rated eye care centers, Florida Eye Specialists is committed to providing personalized glaucoma care tailored to each patient’s needs. Whether you’ve been recently diagnosed or are seeking a second opinion, this video offers valuable guidance from a trusted eye doctor in Jacksonville.
Video Transcript
Glaucoma is the leading cause of preventable blindness in the world today — but what actually is glaucoma? Well, our eye needs to talk to our brain, and there’s actually a long cable that plugs into the back of the eye and runs up to the brain. Glaucoma is damage to this cable connector — I think of it as the cable between your TV and your cable box: if you don’t have a connection, you’re not seeing a picture. As of right now, the only way we have to prevent damage to that cable connection, or your optic nerve, is lowering intraocular pressure.
We have gotten a lot better at diagnosing, detecting, and treating glaucoma, but today, even in patients who are treated for glaucoma, there is a 15-to-20% rate of blindness in one eye over 15 years. The most common reason patients lose vision from glaucoma is that they don’t come in and see their doctor — typically glaucoma is asymptomatic, and patients don’t know they have the problem until it’s too late. The other reason is that the most common treatment for glaucoma is the use of eye drops, and eye drops can be irritating, expensive, and problematic for some of our patients to use.
Now at Florida Eye Specialists, we offer a lot of alternatives to drop treatment in patients who have difficulty with them. There are lasers to lower their pressure, and there are also minimally invasive glaucoma surgeries — tiny glaucoma surgeries that we can do to lower the pressure to either reduce or eliminate the need for eye drops. These surgeries take just a matter of a few minutes to do, they have a very low rate of complications, and most patients find little to no discomfort after the procedure. Originally these procedures were FDA-approved to only do at the time of cataract surgery, but an exciting change we’ve seen over the last year or two is that we can now do these as standalone procedures — we can take you and do a little procedure in a minute or two and reduce your need for drops.
We’re very excited at Florida Eye Specialists because recently the FDA approved ways to place medication into the eye, as opposed to the patient needing to place drops in their eye every single day. Over the last few years, we’ve been one of the investigators in this trial, because we want to make sure we’re bringing cutting-edge technology to our patients. If you have any interest in these treatments, or in anything I’ve talked about today, don’t hesitate to schedule an appointment with one of our fellowship-trained glaucoma specialists at Florida Eye Specialists.
