Can Lasers Blast Away Those Weird Squiggles at the Corners of Your Vision? You’re staring at the sky on a sunny day when you notice, in the corner of your eye, a transparent squiggle floating slowly across the blue. You try and focus on it, but it eludes your glance, refusing to be resolved. No matter where you look, the squiggle knows. What you’ve got is a floater, a tiny piece of protein floating around the vitreous humor, the gel in the back of your eye. But for some people these floaters get worse with age and can become quite large. So a team of scientists want to know if they could safely treat these distracting dots with lasers. Laser treatments have existed for at least 1. Ophthalmic Consultants of Boston write in the paper published today in JAMA Ophthalmology. This is particularly important because of the strong possibility for a placebo effect. The authors recruited 5. They treated 3. 6 patients with YAG laser vitreolysis, which pulses a special kind of laser into the eye. Sixteen control patients instead received a sham treatment with a special filter and the laser on the lowest setting, preventing the laser’s energy from entering their eye. Of the 3. 6 patients, 1. None of the sham group said that—all of them said their negative symptoms were worse, the same or somewhat better. More importantly, 3. YAG laser group lost most or all of their floaters, something that no members of the sham group reported. The authors reported several limitations to their study—it was small, it compared YAG lasers to a sham instead of other treatment options, and the follow up period after which the researchers checked on the patients to see how they were doing was relatively short, only six months. It also might not reflect what the treatment would really look like in a clinical setting, and probably can’t be generalized to all floaters, but just to the specific cases they treated. Those include much larger floaters more common in old people that come with flashes in vision and other symptoms. But one expert, Jennifer Lim from the Illinois Eye and Ear Infirmary at the University of Illinois at Chicago, wrote in a comment that a lot more research is necessary before declaring the treatment safe. ![]() Howard University Students Shout Down James Comey — ‘Get Out Of Here Comey, You’re Not Our Homie’ Tucker Takes Rob Reiner to Task Over ‘War With Russia. The Complicated Science Behind When Babies Are Conceived. Chances are you were told in school that you could get pregnant any time you have sex so don’t have. The latest Chelsea FC news, blogs and videos on Metro. What you’ve got is a floater, a tiny piece of protein floating around the vitreous humor, the gel in the back of your eye. But for some people these floaters get. The authors of the new study selected their patients carefully, which could have aided to their study’s success. She also noted the short follow up period meant some long- term adverse effects could be missed. Despite a reported low rate of complications, it was not proven that YAG vitreolysis is a safe procedure,” she wrote. So maybe we’re not ready to start busting floaters with lasers just yet. Plus, if they’re not giant rings, I actually find watching my floaters quite relaxing. How to Deal with a Miscarriage“I’m sorry, there’s no heartbeat,” my doctor said to me. She didn’t sound very sorry, leaving the room so quickly—ostensibly so I could pull up my underwear—that she couldn’t hear me burst out in tears. There are many ways to lose a pregnancy—from the traditional bleeding in the toilet, to a missed miscarriage where you don’t even know that you miscarried, to a blighted ovum where the baby never started growing at all, to an ectopic pregnancy, where the fetus implanted in the wrong place. I’ve had most of them—they all suck, let me tell you—and I’ve learned the important ways to deal with a miscarriage. Chances are you were told in school that you could get pregnant any time you have sex so don’t have …Read more First, you will probably be in shock. No matter how nervous you were about becoming a mom, no matter how skeptical you were of the pregnancy working out, you will be disappointed times a million. And as awful as this all is—sad and frustrating and emotional—the first thing you have to do is figure out how to start or complete the miscarriage process. There are a number of ways to terminate a failed pregnancy (and I’ve done most of them). Naturally. This means you just let nature take its course. You wait for the bleeding to start and for the pregnancy to pass. For very early pregnancies, like chemical pregnancies which never registered a heartbeat, this is often the recommended route. My very first miscarriage—where I didn’t really know I was pregnant until the prior day—passed this way, and it felt like a really late period. Had I not taken three pregnancy tests, that’s what I would have assumed it was.)Some women prefer to do the natural way no matter how far along in their first trimester they are, but the downside is that you could be waiting a while—which totally creeped me out in my second miscarriage, knowing there was a non- living fetus inside of me. Also, it could be super messy (ditto on the creepy). And it can also be incomplete, sending you to surgery anyway (see #3). The Pill. There is a pill that can help the miscarriage proceed faster—especially if it already started. Misoprostol, which induces labor (and for miscarriages is often given together with Mifepristone) also can be messy and from what I’ve heard, extremely painful. I was advised not to use this because you often end up in surgery anyway (see #3). Surgery. As you can see from my previous two conclusions, I am a big fan of the surgical procedure to terminate a failed pregnancy, specifically the D& C. I am not a doctor, so I can’t give any medical advice except to tell you there are risks to every surgery. But as a patient, by my third miscarriage, I preferred this method of removing the contents of the uterus, usually under general anesthesia. There is a surgical procedure called “aspiration” which involves a vacuum and no general, but I found it awful to be awake, making conversation and watching everything happening.) An ectopic pregnancy must be surgically removed. Here’s why I preferred the D& C: Your pregnancy is terminated quickly and painlessly, for the most part. You don’t have to witness any of the sad bloodshed. It is the most effective way of making sure everything is removed and to get you ready for your next pregnancy. MOST IMPORTANTLY and I can’t stress this enough so I’m going to give it a separate headline .. Get It Tested. If you have surgery you can get what is medically called “the products of conception” tested. That means they can chromosomally test your fetus and see what, if anything, was wrong with it. For older patients, patients undergoing IVF, or in my non- medical opinion, any patient, it is a great comfort to find out that something was wrong with the fetus, which is why it didn’t make it. On the other hand, if they find out that there was nothing wrong with the baby—that it was chromosomally normal—you can investigate other solutions to prevent it from recurring. In fact, I’m such a fan of this method that by my 4th—and final—miscarriage—I scheduled it right away so I could make sure not to lose my chance to test the products. Moving On. It’s only after you’ve dealt with ending the miscarriage that the real loss may hit you: you’re not pregnant anymore. The sadness of this will be accompanied by actual physical symptoms, such as a drop in hormones— those happy- making chemicals that buoyed your bump. I myself often experienced a palpable gut- wrench from the drop, as well as a weight gain that no doctor had warned me about. Look, I’m not going to sugar coat this: There was no good thing about any of my miscarriages. And most people didn’t have any good things to say about it either, like, “At least you can get pregnant.” (Thanks a lot). But maybe the one good thing that can come out of this is that I suffered through indecision and different procedures so you don’t have to. Hopefully you can get through the physical part, so you’ll be free to focus on emotional healing and hopefully, get started trying again.
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November 2017
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