Eye health—everything you need to know | Steven Dell, M.D.

**Peter Attia** (0:11)
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Now, without further delay, here's today's episode.
My guest this week is Steven Dell. Steven is an internationally recognized leader in refractive eye surgery, specializing in LASIK surgery, cataract surgery and refractive lens exchange. He's also the chief medical editor of the journal Cataracts and Refractive Surgery Today.
He's the emeritus chair and president emeritus of the American European Congress of Ophthalmologic Surgery. He's a principal investigator on a variety of FDA clinical trials in the field of eye surgery.
He is the inventor of several surgical instruments and devices and holds over 20 US and international patents in the field of eye surgery. He is also the author of numerous textbook chapters and peer-reviewed journal articles. In this episode, we talk about all things related to the eye and I'm pretty open in the outset of this in explaining that of all the things that one would learn in medical school, there are none that I know less about than the eye. In fact, I come into this episode truly knowing as little as a lay person would know about the eye. And I think at the outset of the interview, I explained the extent to what I know about the eye. And while it may be slightly more than you will know, I promise you that within about 15 minutes of this episode, we are all going to be at the same level. So this for me was just a fascinating discussion. And I treated it almost like the discussion I would have with Steven if we were at a cocktail party, really picking his brain about kind of the anatomy of the eye, why it's relevant, how it factors into the natural processes of aging, and how those kind of differ from some of the pathologic processes that also tend to increase with aging, but are not necessarily related to aging per se.
We get into just the really simple fundamentals of what is nearsightedness, what is farsightedness, what is presbyopia, which by the way, I used to think was farsightedness till I did this interview. We talk of course about what the treatments look like for these things and basically get into a very nuanced discussion about how the different treatments might be beneficial to some people versus others. So we talk obviously about LASIK eye surgery, but we also talk about a procedure that came along slightly before that called PRK. We talk a little bit about a procedure that is just coming online today called SMILE. All three of these are similar, but they differ in fundamental ways and that can be an important thing to consider if you are in the market for one of these procedures. We also talk about eye health. What are the things that we can do? And for many of us listening to this, it's what can we do for our kids to maximize eye health? We talk about some of the real epidemics that are going on in myopia, that is to say kids that are requiring glasses earlier and earlier, what that might be about and what we can do in our kids to prevent those things. And also in ourselves, what we can be doing. So anyway, there's a lot of stuff that's covered in here. This is really kind of the everything you need to know about the eye episode. And I hope you enjoy it as much as I did. So without further delay, please enjoy my conversation with Dr. Steven Dell. Hey, Steven, thank you so much for, for coming over as we were talking about. I don't really do many of these in person anymore, often just out of sheer laziness, but I do enjoy it a lot more. So the fact that I know it was a bit of a hassle, you had to probably change clinic or something today, but anyway, really appreciate you coming out. And this is a topic that I think everybody has questions on this topic and everybody, myself included, is comically ignorant on this topic. I mentioned to you a few minutes ago, the extent of my knowledge from medical school, I remember there's an optic nerve, I remember it's a cranial nerve.