Today we review considerations in acute vision loss with our friendly ophthalmologist Dr Russell Phillips.  He was the previous Head of retinal surgery at Flinders Hospital and frequent lecturer at Flinders Medical School.

I feel I must apologise for my ignorance in some areas in this episode and make it clear that it does not reflect the high level of knowledge of some of my fellow GPs. This was partly due to fatigue from an extremely long and busy day at the clinic and running late so I had no time to prep.  Though the positive flip side of this is I think it is more "real".  One of the challenges of general practice is the requirement to know anything at any point in time, which is near impossible.  I think it is better to not pretend we are omniscient and just be genuine in the fact that we all need to brush up on conditions we see infrequently.  So, I decided to leave it as it was. 

Please see previous episodes for more detail on eye history and examination, and red eye.

Conditions we discuss:

Retinal and vitreous detachment

Retinal artery and venous occlusion

Amaurosis fugax

Optic neuritis

Migraines

Visual cortex disease e.g. strokes, lesions

Temporal arteritis/Giant Cell arteritis

Cataracts

and more