What Is The First Technique Surgeons Learn To Remove A Cataract?

Surgeons in any field always are looking for the best most optimized way to perform a surgery faster and safer. Ophthalmology is no different. Because of this, eye surgeons have come up with many different techniques to remove a cataract. Even with the invention of laser cataract surgery, these techniques are still employed to finish what the laser started.

The first technique that any surgeon learns is called “Divide and Conquer” (most of these techniques have pretty entertaining names 😆) Let’s say you have a bowl of ice cream. This bowl of ice cream is frozen very solid. You want to break this ice cream into four smaller chunks to work through but have no idea how to start because this ice cream is so frozen solid. You could slowly just scrape the surface with the spoon but that would take forever! And driving a knife straight into the ice cream to try to wedge it apart most likely wouldn’t work (and wouldn’t be very safe). So instead, you slowly use your spoon to carve out a “plus sign” pattern on the surface of the ice cream. Gradually you make this plus sign pattern deeper and deeper until you get close to the bottom of the bowl. At this point, the ice cream quadrants are pretty much separated. All you have to do is use two spoons to break the quadrants from the remaining attachments. And there you go, your ice cream is much more manageable. This is the basis of the divide and conquer technique with cataracts!

The cool part about this technique is that is pretty universal. It works on cataracts of all sizes and densities. Have a denser cataract? You just need to create more grooves to separate the quadrants more. Using a laser to break up the cataract? The laser actually employs this technique by pre-creating the grooves for you. All that’s left is to go in and remove the quadrants (or sextants). So go and enjoy that ice cream; You just learned the basics of cataract surgery!

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