“When we’re concerned about our sugar intake, we’re mostly concerned about our added sugar intake. Our added sugar intake should not be more than 10 percent of our total caloric intake for the day. Added sugars are present, mostly, in sweetened beverages, so sodas and fruit juices, as well as processed food. Food that you’ll find in a box, a bag, any kind of container is going to contain added sugar. Natural sugars are okay, fruit, milk will contain sugar, and that’s okay to consume. The concern is that if you have a high percentage of added sugar intake, you might not be meeting your nutritional needs within your caloric limit.”

“CDC.gov is very helpful when travelling. It shows vaccinations required for different countries as well as malaria prophylaxis recommendations. Of course, routine vaccinations are recommended. These include MMR, polio, hepatitis B, as well, as tetanus. Some additional vaccinations you may wish to have depending on where you’re traveling include hepatitis A, as well as, typhoid. Others that are less often used would include yellow fever. Please consult your physician depending on where you’re travelling for vaccinations and malaria prophylaxis recommendations.”

“Patients who come from families where there’s a history of diabetes on either side of the family can have a higher risk of developing diabetes, assuming that their dietary and exercise habits are not optimal. What we also find is that if they have a sibling with type 1 diabetes and they’re young, their risk of developing type 1 diabetes is also slightly higher than average. In general, though, the typical rule that we see is that people who are careful about their diet and exercise habits, despite their family history, tend to follow a normal pattern of development over time. If they’re children, and as adults, they may have a slightly higher risk. But generally they end up doing well and may not go on to develop diabetes in any way.”

“Cataract surgery is the only treatment for cataracts, which is a very common condition causing clouding of the natural lens of the eye. What we do during the surgery is remove the lens, the natural lens of the eye, through a very small, two-millimeter incision and replace it with a brand new artificial lens that sits in the same physiological location where the previous lens used to be. This surgery is efficient and it restores the vision to what it was prior to the onset of the cataract. Now, there have been recent advancements in the cataract surgery, specifically laser assisted cataract surgery. During this process, we replace certain steps performed by microsurgical instruments with a laser that makes the surgery even more efficient and decreases surgical time. Recently, we’ve also had an expansion of the intraocular implants, which is the lens that we put inside the eye. The lenses that we now offer have a wide range of prescriptions that they are able to correct, ranging from astigmatism as well as what we call extended depth of focus lenses that offer correction of the wide range of refractive errors, including presbyopia.”

“This is a question that I get asked often in my office these days. Platelet-rich plasma, or PRP, is a solution of plasma with a much higher concentration of platelets than normally found in your blood. The average human has about five liters, or 1.5 gallons, of blood in their body, mostly consisting of plasma. Within that plasma, you have red blood cells, white blood cells, and platelets. Platelets used to be known only for clotting. Now it’s been found that platelets also have a lot of growth factors in them. So platelet-rich plasma, or PRP, is a solution where we take your blood, spin it down, extract the platelets, and come up with a solution with a higher concentration of platelets than normal plasma. This allows us to inject it into your body to promote healing.”