After more than 20 years of doing ocular surgery, there are only a few surgical pearls that amaze and surprise me — this is one of those! I posted a previous video of a simplified pterygium technique and I received a comment from Dr. Jose Alejandro Lozano Viera from Mexico, which offered a kind suggestion. He has a tremendous amount of experience performing pterygia surgery (much more than me) and he suggested that a blade was not needed to remove the pterygium from the cornea.
He explained that if we cut off the blood supply to the pterygium and then just wait (15 minutes in the case shown here), the adhesion to the cornea will become much less and then we can simply use forceps to peel the pterygium off the cornea.
So recently, a resident booked a combined pterygium and cataract surgery with me. We tried this technique… and it worked fantastically well! I am so impressed and amazed with this technique and I am so thankful to our CataractCoach fans who contribute so much by sharing their knowledge with us.
Click below to learn this amazing way to peel the pterygium off the cornea:
Hi Uday. I am fernando aguilera md from mexicali , mexico (desert zone) I have been using the peeling technique for more than 20 years and works most of the times but usually there are deeper adhesions that leave an uneven rought cornea surface. Today I tried the suggested prolonged waiting time before the pterigyumrexis and IT WORKS better than waiting less time
Congrats for sharing this important tip
thank you for the feedback! I enjoy learning from colleagues like you who perform much more pterygium surgery than I do.
The head of pterygium can be peeled off in the same way without the need to cut the blood supply. I start peeling the pterygium head first & it works just fine
Thank you for the comment