Yesterday, I looked up information regarding what may be one of the issues with my right eye, based on one conversation I heard between my father and an eye doctor a few years ago. It kinda made me update my and the doctor’s levels of rationality downward a little, but I also realize I’m only working with surface-level information from like two Google searches and the Wikipedia article.
Uveitis is an inflammation of the uvea, generally the iris and surrounding tissues, which can lead to photophobia and vision loss. I looked up the Wikipedia article on Uveitis at some point more than two years ago but probably less than 8 years ago, and was not convinced that it was even the correct condition (I had no memory of the term before that conversation, but I didn’t pay much attention to all the incomprehensible medical terminology much before then; the causes didn’t seem to match my observations, etc). Considering that the symptoms match my experience pretty closely, this was probably stupid. I was focusing on three particular factors that seemed causal to me: namely, I was only 2 years into puberty when it became a problem, I’d been taking eyedrops in an unusual way just before the incident and then misplaced them a couple days before, and the worst symptoms began with my first attempt to look around on the streets of Las Vegas in mid summer. It definitely felt like look in the general direction of sun while outside in Las Vegas → hereto unfamiliar eye pain → photophobia and rapid vision loss. So the first time I read the Wikipedia article and saw that infection is a common cause, I completely failed to update away from “Las Vegas nuked my eye” toward “maybe a bacteria did it”. Considering that one of the common pathogens associated with the condition is apparently Toxoplasmosis Gondiae, and I’d been around an infant both known to carry it and have lymphatic issues for thirteen months prior to visiting Las Vegas (not to mention that I’d touched a corpse with the same just before said infant’s birth), that’s some poor updating on my part.
The more bothersome part, though, is that I took the doctor at his word when he said that the only practical treatment for Uveitis (presumably uveitis-caused vision loss) would be a bionic eye. Yet as early as 2005, the FDA had approved Retisert, which was an improvement over the previous method of shutting down the immune system to get the inflammation under control. An August 2011 report from the National Institute of Health showed that such treatments (either through implants, or inserting capsules into the eye) tend to reduce symptoms entirely, and in some cases resulted in a vision improvement of up to one line on the eye charts (I have no idea what one line on the eye charts means, or if this is significant at the stage of my vision loss). They found that capsules are much safer, but implants work more quickly; otherwise, they’re equally effective.
What remains unclear to me is whether Retisert is only effective against specific types of Uveitis, whether or not it would have a non-negligible probability of improving my vision to a useful degree, whether it’s actually available to me, etc. (If I had $5000 to throw around, I’d consider hiring Meta Med to look into it. I have less than $1000 to my name at the moment, so that won’t be happening any time soon.).
(Annoyingly, the first Google result I got for Uveitis treatment was a discussion thread with multiple people recommending homeopathy. This makes me wonder if just pouring water into one’s eyes can temporarily reduce inflamation about as well as most prescription drops, but there’s probably a study suggesting otherwise and this was just a couple people with a decent placebo boost.)
Yesterday, I looked up information regarding what may be one of the issues with my right eye, based on one conversation I heard between my father and an eye doctor a few years ago. It kinda made me update my and the doctor’s levels of rationality downward a little, but I also realize I’m only working with surface-level information from like two Google searches and the Wikipedia article.
Uveitis is an inflammation of the uvea, generally the iris and surrounding tissues, which can lead to photophobia and vision loss. I looked up the Wikipedia article on Uveitis at some point more than two years ago but probably less than 8 years ago, and was not convinced that it was even the correct condition (I had no memory of the term before that conversation, but I didn’t pay much attention to all the incomprehensible medical terminology much before then; the causes didn’t seem to match my observations, etc). Considering that the symptoms match my experience pretty closely, this was probably stupid. I was focusing on three particular factors that seemed causal to me: namely, I was only 2 years into puberty when it became a problem, I’d been taking eyedrops in an unusual way just before the incident and then misplaced them a couple days before, and the worst symptoms began with my first attempt to look around on the streets of Las Vegas in mid summer. It definitely felt like look in the general direction of sun while outside in Las Vegas → hereto unfamiliar eye pain → photophobia and rapid vision loss. So the first time I read the Wikipedia article and saw that infection is a common cause, I completely failed to update away from “Las Vegas nuked my eye” toward “maybe a bacteria did it”. Considering that one of the common pathogens associated with the condition is apparently Toxoplasmosis Gondiae, and I’d been around an infant both known to carry it and have lymphatic issues for thirteen months prior to visiting Las Vegas (not to mention that I’d touched a corpse with the same just before said infant’s birth), that’s some poor updating on my part.
The more bothersome part, though, is that I took the doctor at his word when he said that the only practical treatment for Uveitis (presumably uveitis-caused vision loss) would be a bionic eye. Yet as early as 2005, the FDA had approved Retisert, which was an improvement over the previous method of shutting down the immune system to get the inflammation under control. An August 2011 report from the National Institute of Health showed that such treatments (either through implants, or inserting capsules into the eye) tend to reduce symptoms entirely, and in some cases resulted in a vision improvement of up to one line on the eye charts (I have no idea what one line on the eye charts means, or if this is significant at the stage of my vision loss). They found that capsules are much safer, but implants work more quickly; otherwise, they’re equally effective.
What remains unclear to me is whether Retisert is only effective against specific types of Uveitis, whether or not it would have a non-negligible probability of improving my vision to a useful degree, whether it’s actually available to me, etc. (If I had $5000 to throw around, I’d consider hiring Meta Med to look into it. I have less than $1000 to my name at the moment, so that won’t be happening any time soon.).
(Annoyingly, the first Google result I got for Uveitis treatment was a discussion thread with multiple people recommending homeopathy. This makes me wonder if just pouring water into one’s eyes can temporarily reduce inflamation about as well as most prescription drops, but there’s probably a study suggesting otherwise and this was just a couple people with a decent placebo boost.)