This is an eye with meibomian gland dysfunction. You can see the meibomian glands as little white pores along the eyelid margin. These glands produce oil which is an important component of the tear film (the oil keeps the tears from evaporating too quickly). When the meibomian glands clog up, the oil gets thick and can cause surface irritation.
In this video you can see that the oil comes out like toothpaste when the gland is pressed with a q-tip.
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Here’s a video showing conjunctival gold jewelry. Seems like they just create a pocket under the conjunctiva with Wescott scissors and lay the implant in it. Seems like the gold applicator is way bigger than needed, but maybe the jewelry is thin and bends easily? The whole concept is ridiculous.
One problem with audio flashcards is that there isn’t a good way to organize them when on the go. You can’t hi-light them, separate them into separate stacks, or throw away bad cards. Everything is digital audio!
There is one way to mark your cards on the iPod, however, and that’s to mark your mp3 file with the star rating. This star rating was meant to be a way of rating your music collection as to how much you like each song. You can also use them to mark your audioflash cards.
Keep in mind that you need your iPod to be set up for autosyncing for this to work (read more about this here).
Sorting your favorite and least favorite cards:
One of my favorite uses of the star system is to remove super-easy questions from my player. For example, if I come across a card that I never want to hear again, I mark it with a one-star rating. The next time I sync with iTunes, this one-star rating ports over to the computer where I can see it. I then group these crummy questions and delete them all at once!
You can use the star system to label the questions however you like. For example, you could create your own system that looks like this:
5 Star: Very Hard, want to hear often
4 Star: Tricky, want to hear this one a few more times
3 Star: Read more about this when I get time
2 Star: I think card is wrong, better check
1 Star: Delete as soon as possible
0 Star: Default
Write this down on a piece of paper and tape the legend on your iPOD. Whatever! The next time you synch to iTunes you can group all your stars together and act on them if you want. Personally, I use this less complicated system:
5 Star: Super hard or high-yield question that I want to hear again
4 Star: Pretty good question that’s worth hearing again
1 Star: Delete this question, either it’s too simple or bonkers
The Smart Star Playlist!
The true power of the star-rating system is only realized when you combine it with smart-playlists. You can create a smart playlist that will suck in all your 5-star questions. Or make a bigger smartlist that combines your 4 or 5 star questions.
Now, everytime you rate any question as 5 or 4-stars, it automatically gets sucked into this star playlist. This smartlist update occurs directly within your iPod, so you can build a collection of good questions without even connecting to your computer. When you DO synch to iTunes, the star ratings will update as well! Cool!
Here’s my smart playlist to organize my difficult 5-star questions:
Summary:
Star ratings are a great way to organize your lists while away from your computer. They allow you to prioritize questions and create more intelligent playlists. They take a little work to initially set up but they work great for singling out difficult questions while on-the-go. You may want to check out my own personal playlist rules (that I use for these cards) to get an idea of how you might organize your flashcards.
Playlists are a great way to organize your music and your ophthalmology audio flashcards. However, they take a fair amount of work to create and maintain. For example, let’s say you have a slow Sunday afternoon, and want to listen to only high-yield flashcards containing these topics:
Phacomatosis
Corneal dystrophies
White dot syndromes
HLA associations
With a regular playlist, you have to create the list, then manually search through your collection of keywords for each topic and manually drag the files into the list.
It’s not THAT hard, but smart playlists make this task even easier. For example, you can create a smart playlist that has RULES, that say to include questions with ANY of the following keywords:
phacomatosis, corneal dystrophy, white dot, HLA
Now, EVERY file that has those terms in the editable id3 tags will be automatically sucked into that playlist, and depending upon your configutation of your portable iPod, into the player’s smartplaylist. This is very useful if you make your own flashcards as they instantly populate the proper smartlist.
This doesn’t seem that useful!
No … well, how about this. In order to keep my music separated from my flashcards, I have a smart playlist called “just music” with the rule: Include all music files without the term “rootatlas.com” in the album artist
Now, all of my regular music populates this folder and the flashcards stay out. When I rip my CD collection, I don’t have to remember to copy the new files into my “just music” playlist, as the smartlist automatically adds the songs.
Still not impressed?
Ok, how about this: many flashcards are relevant to several subspecialties. Congenital glaucoma, for example, can grouped into both glaucoma and pediatrics. So, I’ve set up my Pediatrics smart list to include everything from my pediatrics album (the stuff I recorded when reading the pediatrics books).
In addition, I’ve constructed the smartlist to pull in any flashcards with the keywords like pediatrics, kids, children, congenital, baby, neonate, or neonatal. Now, all my pediatric retinal syndromes get sucked in as do all the juvenile uveitis topics!
In fact, I listen to my flashcards entirely from smart playlists I’ve created for each subspecialty. To get an idea how you might want to set up your own smart lists, click here.
In Conclusion:
Smart playlists are very useful when organizing your audio flashcards. They become even more important when using the “star rating” system of organization, letting you organize your cards without need of a computer! You can read more about the star system here.
Many people with an iPod never bother to create playlists … just dragging all their music onto the device and shuffling through them randomly.
Unfortunately, this method of mass file transfer doesn’t work well with our flashcards, as your music and questions will mix together. Nobody wants to hear about phacomatosis right in the middle of a Pink Floyd marathon!
Playlists are great because they allow you to separate your music files into collections, such as “just music” or “all my flashcards.” To create a playlist within iTunes, go to “File – New Playlist” and name it.
Then, select all the files you want in your playlist and drag them into the folder.
You can be highly selective in your playlists. iTunes search function allows you to easily look up a topic (like cornea, inheritance patterns) and drag the results into a your custom playlist. For example, you could make playlists on:
Subspecialty (Retina, cornea, glaucoma, plastics)
High Yield Topics (phacomatosis, white dot syndromes, studies and trials)
Difficult Questions (gene associations)
Weird Syndromes
I personally like to create a playlist for each subspecialty, as this is an easy way to playback the files on my iPod. Subspecialty playlists are nice because you can syncronize them with your own studies. Plus, breaking your questions into smaller increments allows you to work through a manageble number at a time.
Once you’ve got the idea of playlist creation down, you might want to seriously consider creating your own “smartlists” which are even more useful!
iTunes is a little funny in how it manages your music. When I first began making audio flashcards, I found that they became increasingly difficult to organize. A thousand mp3 files on your iPod really messes with your music experience, and I found it disconcerting when my Duke Ellington was interrupted by a question on foveal telangiectasia.
I quickly learned to create playlists to separate out my regular “music” from my “flashcards.” You can read more about creating playlists in our playlist article.
A bigger problem for me, was that I began to get duplicate files on my player and the 5-star ratings I created on my handheld iPod wasn’t transferring back to my iTunes upon syncing. This was very annoying … and I finally discovered the reason. I had my iPod nano set to sync “manually.”
Turns out you can set up your iPod to synchronize in one of two modes:
1. Manually Sync Music: You drag songs from iTunes directly onto the player icon. This is the most intuitive method of file transfer, and how I normally have my own players set. However, as I mentioned above, it doesn’t work well with audio flashcards because this method doesn’t allow you to sync your song ratings (star ratings are very useful) and this mode also limits your playlist management.
2. Automatically Synch your Music: This method seems more complicated at first, but works best with large file collections and particularly with this flashcard system. With every synch, your computer looks at the playlists you’ve created in iTunes (such as “my favorite songs” or “music for running” or “Cornea Flashcards”) and makes sure they synch up into the corresponding folder on your player.
I recommend using the “auto synch” feature as this will allow you to rate using the star system on your portable mp3 player. For example, you can mark all the difficult questions as 5-star and the easy ones as 1-star. These star ratings will sync back to iTunes the next time you connect through USB. This star system is great for organizing your lists (click here to read more about the benefits of the star rating system).
How to change the sync mode:
You can switch your player settings by plugging in your iPod via USB, clicking on the iPOD icon in the left-hand panel, and choosing the “main tab”
Check on “sync manually.” Keep in mind that the music currently on your device will likely delete, forcing you to rebuild your music playlists. Then, you can choose which playlists you want to always synch (such as those flashcard lists) and check the ones you want!
That’s pretty much all there is to it! Now your flashcards and ratings will remain synched between your player and your computer, and you can study from either and have everything backed up properly.
The iPod is a great mp3 player, and an ideal platform for listening to audio flashcards. Here’s how to get the flashcard files from this site onto your player.
Step 1: Download and Unzip
You first need to download the audio files onto your computer from our download page. There are over 1,400 separate mp3 files, so it would be impossible for you to download them one-by-one. Instead, I’ve “zipped” them together into larger files. You can unzip these files using your computer’s built in unzip feature.
On a PC, right-mouse-click on the file and choose “Extract All” from the pop-up menu. A folder will be created that has all the mp3 files inside.
Step 2: Import the audiofiles into iTunes.
Import the files into iTunes. You choose “File-Import Folder” and locate the appropriate folder on your computers hard drive.
This will pull all the files into the iTunes music directory. Depending upon how you’ve set your iTunes preferences, the mp3 files will remain in their current location, or a copy of all 1,400 audio files will be copied into a new folder within your iTunes music folder.
Step 3: Quick organization of files
At this point, you may find that your iTunes music collection seems to be dominated by audio flashcards. You can organize these audio files into playlists to get rid of the clutter. I’m not going to cover playlists in this article (check out our playlist article) but here are a few quick changes you may want to make within iTunes:
First, you may want to change the visible id3 tags. Right-mouse-click on the upper tab (the thin horizontal bar where it says “name, album, etc.”) and place checkmarks next to the available tags you want. The important ones for us are album and comments (which has the keywords in them) and the star rating system.
Step 4: Copy the flashcards onto your device
Copying the flashcards can be done in two ways, and the method you’ll use will depend upon whether you have your mp3 player set up for manual or auto-sync (you can read about the pros/cons of both these modes in our sync article).
Manual sync: Simply hi-light all the files, and drag them onto your player’s icon
Auto-sync: In this mode, you’ll need to create a playlist, called “All Flashcards” or something similar, and copy the flashcards to this playlist and sync the list.
Summary:
That’s pretty much it. Once you get the files onto your iPod, you can jump listen to them! I’ve created separate “albums” for each subspecialty, allowing you to listen to each subspecialty (retina, glaucoma, etc..) just like you would listen to a CD album.
Once you actually get the flashcards installed, you may find the sheer number (1,400 of them at present) a little overwhelming. I recommend you reading though the other articles in this help section, which will cover topics of playlists, smart playlists, and using the “star” system. iTunes can be confusing, but once you master these concepts, will allow you to organize your cards and search through them with ease!
Photo: Meibomian gland dysfunction
This photograph shows the expression of oil from the meibomian glands of the lower eyelid.
To get a better idea how this looks, you may want to watch our meibomian... Photo: Meibomian Glands
This is a photograph of the lower eyelid. You can see small glands right on the edge of the lid ... these are meibomian glands, which produce important oils for... Photo: Meibomian glands of the eyelids
Here is a photograph of the eye. If you examine the lower eyelid, you can see small light-colored poors along the margin. These are the orifices to the meibomian... Welcome to the premiere source for ophthalmology videos!
This website is chock-full of eye videos taken at the slit-lamp. Here you’ll find movies covering a wide variety of ocular pathology, ranging from the cornea all the way back... Our Videos! Check out our huge selection of streamable/downloadable ophthalmology videos. These eye videos are great for beginning residents and medical students and the acting clinician. Plus, each is in a downloadable...
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meibomianblepharitis.wmv (5.9 meg, Windows video file)
Introduction
Step 1: Download and Unzip
