Since I’m wildly in love with medicine and thoroughly enjoy pontificating to other people, this routine post should be useful to everyone involved! I think I’ll call it Mid-Day Medicine (MDM).
Further – since I work in Ophthalmology (OPH-THAL-MOLOGY), the first topic should be about the eye. Why not?
A lot of patients with a lump in their eye come into our clinic and label it as a ‘stye’. I remember as a kid using that word to self-diagnose every type, colored, shaped, and painful lump that appeared neat my eye ball. Truthfully, however, there’s another kind of lump that I see a lot more often then the former discussed one: Chalazion.
To sum up the difference of stye vs. chalazion you really have to look at where the inflammation is occurring. Styes, quite simply, are an infection / inflammation of the glands in your eyelids – often resulting from blocked eyelash follicles. As a result you will more likely then not see styes as pimple-like bumps on the edge of your eye lid. They’re usually more painful then chalazia and often resolve themselves after coming to a head and draining.
The chalazion, however, is often caused by the body’s inflammation response to a blocked or ruptured sweat glad (meibomian gland) within the eye lid. These buggers can get huge – and I mean huge. One patient I examined had a lump that measured just under 3 cm in diameter! They are also more prone to outlast a patient’s attempt to relieve them by warm compress and cleaning. Unfortunately, they may end up needing a procedure known as I & D (Incision and Drainage) to finally eradicate them.
Hope you enjoyed that little factoid. And just for shits and giggles, I’ll throw in a medical word that you’ll understand now the next time your Dr uses it.
Pruritis = Itching.
