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However, you are encouraged to wear a mask if that makes you feel safe. This is consistent with the State of California’s move toward an “endemic” COVID approach.
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If your doctor told you that you have PMD, you likely get decent vision with updated eyeglasses and received diagnosis later in life compared to others with keratoconus. PMD is the same thing as keratoconus, just a subclass of it.
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The fact that some patients have a PMD-type topography in one eye and a more classic keratoconus topography in their other eye, also supports that these are the same disease entity. In other words, most patients with PMD likely had onset of their corneal distortion in the adolescent years despite diagnosis coming much later due to mild symptoms. Since many patients with PMD achieve good vision with eyeglasses with the bulk of the corneal distortion decentered downward out of the line of sight, PMD would often get diagnosed later because vision symptoms often are more subtle. Many eye doctors and patients incorrectly assumed that the time of diagnosis was also the time of onset. But in fact, PMD is often diagnosed later because it tends to impact vision less. Second, PMD supposedly had a later onset in life. Reprocessing an axial topography to tangential view generally uncovers a classic keratoconus pattern for most alleged cases of PMD (Figure 2). A topography can be viewed as an “axial map” which smooths out data points, or as a “tangential” map which provides a more point-to-point assessment of light bending power. First, the classic “crab-claw” or “butterfly” topography pattern attributed to PMD (Figure 1) was just due to the way the topographical map was viewed. Two factors previously confused eye doctors into believing that PMD and keratoconus were separate eye conditions. Same topography as Figure 1 but under a tangential view.
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