A Quick Look Through the Clouds - Speaker - Gavin Galloway

Club member and retired optician Gavin Galloway gave a talk  on cataracts and cataract surgery. Gavin spoke about the signs of cataracts slowly developing with the lens in the eye becoming increasingly cloudy with colours looking less vibrant. He said there were any different types of cataract. Modern surgery was a quick procedure, painless, low risk and with a high success rate. Gavin talked by the history of cataracts and cataract surgery from primitive “couching” from 1200BC to a basic procedure invented by a French surgeon in 1747 through to intra-ocular lens surgery first licensed in 1981. Latest techniques involved extra capsular extraction with a flexible IOL. Gavin said there had been an explosion in the number of cataract procedures. 4272 were done in 1979 and the figure for 2024 was 734,000. Gavin was bombarded with questions from his audience and Will Aitken thanked him for a fascinating talk.