Dr. Richard Shuldiner has seen over 10,000 patients in his lifetime for low vision care.
“I started practicing back in the 1970s in Poughkeepsie, New York,” Shuldiner said. “(I) went to a lecture somewhere about low vision and discovered there were no low vision doctors in my area, and I thought that people needed the service so I would learn how to do it.”
Shuldiner was trained and found there were few services available to the blind in the area, so he contacted New York Lighthouse and created the upstate New York Lighthouse Low Vision Clinic with them.
“About the year 2000 – because it’s very difficult for eye doctors to get trained in doing low vision, I started a training program,” Shuldiner said. “I’ve trained somewhere around 40 doctors to do this kind of work throughout the country, and we have an organization called the International Academy of Low Vision Specialists.”
Shuldiner sees patients with different types of low vision problems, two forms being macular degeneration and diabetic retinopathy.
“Macular degeneration is the leading cause of vision loss among seniors in the world right now, at least in the United States,” Shuldiner said. “There are two types: there’s a wet type in which there’s bleeding in the back of the eye by the retina, by the macular part of the retina, and then the dry type the macular cells just die.
“Macular is one part of the retina – it is the most sensitive part because it has the most photocells. When somebody says look at that, you turn your eye and you actually align your macular part of the retina so that you can see it the best,” Shuldiner said. “In order to really get that, if you were to take a look at something right now, anything, in detail, and then look an inch or two or three to the side, you’ll notice that it’s very hard to tell what it actually is even though it’s clear.”
Anything off the macular doesn’t have the clarity due to it not having the same number of photocells, according to Shuldiner…..
Read more: https://myvalleynews.com/low-vision-doctor-provides-care-for-those-on-their-last-hope/
Source: My Valley News