Primer for a Novice Researcher
1.Steps before starting your research journey: Choose a broad area in your discipline (Ophthalmology) that fascinates you. Medical rather than surgical disciplines offer more research opportunities. Know that inflammations of the uvea and retinal diseases offer immense opportunities for interdisciplinary research. Get cross-disciplinary training to gain insight into disease epidemiology, etiopatho...Read More
Top 10 Tips for Young Researchers
1. Ask a question: One of the many things that I learnt from my mentor Prof Amod Gupta is to learn the art of asking a question. Though our society is changing with times and encouraging the students to ask questions, I still see hesitation amongst our residents to ask a question about any subject being discussed or question the way of management; even though they may not agree. As a result, many ...Read More
Ten Lessons I Learnt from My Patients
Greet your patients by their name: As the patient enters your chamber, always greet the patient by his first or last name. It has a magical effect on gaining their trust. The patients remember their doctors but the doctor remembering the patient is a very big deal. This is especially true for those practicing in busy referral institutes in metropolitan cities. Whenever I addressed them by their na...Read More
It is a human tendency to compare everything with day-to-day life happening, objects around them. Proverbs are one such example; they give some form of life advice with examples of very commonly occurring incidents/things in our daily life. In medical science, we often come across such analogical expressions that had been picked up from some common objects. Because of the resemblance with the morp...Read More
Seven Points You Should Know about Mucormycosis
What is Mucormycosis? Mucormycosis is a fungus that is ubiquitous. This organism is present in the soil and all around us and is also a commensal that is present in the nose and oropharynx. It is an opportunistic organism – this means that it invades and causes infection only when the host’s immune system is compromised. A normal healthy person’s immune system would easily be able to fight a funga...Read More
Balancing Clinical and Research Work
How does one balance between clinical and research work? This is an often-repeated question-probably because the answer is never clear. The fulcrum of the balance is not the same for everyone. Let us pause for a while and try to define certain things to bring clarity. What is clinical work? This is perhaps best defined as the time and effort involved in direct care of patients. Obviously, it also ...Read More
Smartphone Gonio-imaging: The Truly Frugal Indian Revolution
Introduction: Gonioscopy is the evaluation of the angle of the anterior chamber, a term coined by Alexios Tarantas.[1] It is one of the three important components to diagnose and classify glaucoma, the visual field changes and the optic nerve head evaluation being the other two. This clinical skill which should be performed on each patient visiting the clinic for the first time is not performed as...Read More
Do you Know !! The eye muscles are the most active muscles in the whole body. The external muscles that move ht eyes are the strongest muscles in the human body for the job that they have to do. They are 100 times powerful than they need to be. Eyes are composed of more than two million working parts. The eye can process 36,000 bits of information every hour. A normal lifespan will bring you almos...Read More
Scientific Writing: Common Pitfalls & How to Avoid Them
The preceding chapters have given us a fair idea of how to go about writing an original manuscript for publication: the why, the what, and the how of manuscript writing. We have been primed with inspiration, research tools, and the nitty-gritty of techniques to carve out an original contribution to science from the banalities of repetitious clinical routines. But before we jump headlong into the u...Read More
Vernal Keratoconjunctivitis - FIVE Important Points We Should Know
Allergic conjunctivitis, which includes a spectrum of clinical entities is one of the most common conditions with which patients present to a general ophthalmologist. They include milder forms like seasonal and perennial allergic conjunctivitis as well as severe forms like vernal and atopic which can be sight-threatening. In spite of common clinical and immunological features vernal keratoconjunct...Read More