I am delighted to announce that last month, I graduated from my third fellowship – this time in the area of Pterygium Surgery using the P.E.R.F.E.C.T. technique under the kind mentorship and guidance of Professor Lawrie Hirst.
It has been an undertaking for the last 12 months in the background and I am incredibly grateful for his dedication to training me to the nth level in this specific area of surgery.
👁️What is this technique? P.E.R.F.E.C.T. for Pterygium stands for “Pterygium Extended Removal Followed by Extended Conjunctival Transplant” and is essentially everything that the acronym states.
🤔Why did I spend a year doing this when we already kind of “do” this surgery? It’s a good question. Put simply, when I looked into the literature around this specific technique, the numbers spoke for themselves.
🌿It is the only technique in the peer reviewed literature that prospectively followed over 4000 consecutive patients of a single surgeon, using a single technique, at a single centre.
💝Over 30 papers have been published on this technique, including the more recent papers on cosmesis pitting surgeons against patients to see if they could detect which eye had had surgery. Essentially, neither could tell with good accuracy which eye had been operated on.
Our most recent data has been accepted for ASCRS 2024 and we can briefly extract from our data:
– 4000 cases using the P.E.R.F.E.C.T Technique
– 3980 for Pterygium (the rest for irritating pinguecula) from 2001 – 2023
– 86.9% primary pterygia, 13.1% recurrent pterygia
– 1 recurrence after our own technique in a primary pterygium (1 in 3980)
– Of the 543 recurrence cases operated on (initial surgeries elsewhere), 501 cases had one prior removal, 36 cases had 2 prior removals and 6 cases had 3 previous removals
– Only 2 of this recurrence group recurred, and did not require treatment after we treated them definitely for the second PERFECT technique.
So thank you for taking me on as your very last pupil, Prof. I’m truly honored to have had the opportunity to train with you.