Recently, a noted eye surgeon by the name of Dr. Howard Gimbel marked his second anniversary of uploading his first video onto his YouTube channel, called the Gimbel Library. Apparently, his channel has been viewed over 72,000 times by medical students, residents and other practising surgeons. The channel itself has over 100 videos of Dr Gimbel performing eye surgery and explaining what he is doing step by step.

In one of the videos I watched, he was performing a mature cataract surgery in front of students and they could ask questions to him while he was performing the surgery. Although not directly, they had to ask their questions to a host of some sort, since it was an interactive session, and then the questions would be then relayed onto Dr Gimbel.

The videos are a pretty decent quality (not HD) and you can hear the sounds of the actual equipment working on the patient’s eye. For the cataract surgery I mentioned earlier, you could actually hear the ultrasound  breaking down the cataract and the machine sucking up the broken down bits of the cataract. (I’m not sure if it was ultrasound, since we can’t actually hear ultrasound frequencies, but you can definitely hear something high-pitched)

Dr. Gimbel records virtually every eye surgery he has performed. In fact, he’s recorded practically all of the surgeries he’s performed since 1986! So what you have left is one massive library of “eye surgery tutorials”.

Although this is great news for those wanting to become an eye surgeon, I wish there were more videos like this for optometry!