Glaucoma...drops or laser trabeculoplasty
You have been told that you have glaucoma... now what? You learn by the doctors at North Shore Eye Care in Smithtown New York that you can control the disease. Glaucoma is a eye problem where the intraocular pressure in the eye is too high for that eye. The optic nerve slowly gets damaged and can constrict the visual field over time. At our practice on Long Island serving Suffolk and Nassau Counties, Dr. Jeffrey Martin and Dr. Lawrence Zweibel carefully examine each patient and help decide on the best treatment. Many patients from Huntington, Dix Hills, Northport, Commack, St. James, Kings Park, Stony Brook, Setauket, and Port Jefferson count on Dr. Martin and Dr. Zweibel because they were voted "Top Doctors: New York Metro Area" by Castle Connolly Ltd. This distinction puts them among the top 10% of specialists in a given field of medicine.
When eye drops are not enough to control glaucoma, selective laser trabeculoplasy can be an option. This is a cold laser with few to no side effects that we use in our Smithtown New York practice to control intraocular pressure. The procedure takes a couple of minutes, is painless and can be repeated if needed. We find that SLT controls intraocular pressure about as well as one glaucoma medicaiton.
In rare occasions, surgery is necessary to control glaucoma. Trabeculectomy or tube shunts can be used in surgery to reduce the intraocular pressure. Chemicals like mitomycin C are sometimes used to help maintain a reduced intraocular pressure.
With modern cataract surgery, cataract surgery can be performed in most cases without negatively affecting the intraocular pressure. Dr. Martin and Dr. Zweibel specialize in advanced cataract surgery and can often perform the surgery in just minutes. They also use the latest in multifocal and accommodating intraocular lenses such as crystalens HD, restor, rezoom and toric intraocular lenses for astigmatism. Dr. Martin and Dr. Zweibel look forward to using the tecnis multifocal when it becomes fda approved.
At North Shore Eye Care, we also do many hundred laser eye surgery and laser vision correction procedures each year. We do only bladeless and custom lasik for the most precise and safest procedure available. For those that can not have lasik, prk or advanced surface ablation as well as lasek and epilasik are always options.