The following transcript has been edited for clarity.

Hi, I'm Sunir J. Garg, MD, FACS, professor of ophthalmology at Wills Eye Hospital, and I just came back from an incredible Retina World Congress, where I gave a talk titled “Retina Doesn’t Have to Be a Pain in the Neck, or the Back.”

As I've gotten older, I realized that ergonomics is something that's critically important for me because my regular aging aches and pains seem to be worse because of what we do every day. As much as our profession is amazing, I never really appreciated how physically taxing it can be. There’s been a few studies comparing occupational injury amongst ophthalmologists compared to other medical specialties, and we have a much higher risk of developing neck, back, wrist, and shoulder pain as compared to some of our other colleagues throughout medicine.

There's a bunch of different reasons for that. When you think about how we spend our days in the clinic, we're either hunched over at the slit lamp or hunched over at the computer—all of which can lead to poor posture. Doing that dozens of times a day for a 30- or 40-year career can really take a toll on our neck and our back. And in the operating room, we're forcing ourselves to adapt to the microscope and to the gurney and that can also make it really challenging to maintain good health and be arthritis free for a lot of years to come.

There are a few things that we can do to make it better. Number one, exercise is really important. Core stability—whether it's Pilates, yoga, or regular strength training—can help us maintain that alignment. Number two, body awareness is important. When I'm teaching my residents and fellows, many times I'll either adjust their body and just look at how they're positioning themselves or take photos of their posture to help correct some of those things at an early age. And number three, being mindful and trying to adjust ourselves best to our equipment is important.

For example, with the slit lamp, a lot of times when the patient's footrest is down, my chair starts to hit the footrest, I can't get close to them, so I end up having to lean forward to position myself. Sometimes I'll lift the patient's chair up a couple inches so my casters can slide underneath the chair, or even lift up the footrest. That allows me to get closer to the patient and bring myself up. We have to remember the patient will be in that position for maybe half a minute, where we will be in that position for multiple times a day.

Reordering our workspace, or facing the patient when we're typing in the computer, that's important, but that's kind of more of a long-term project. In the operating room, maintaining spinal neutrality is helpful. I operate at the patient's head, so I bring their head toward the top of the bed as much as I can. So the head is really touching my abdomen that allows me to be more upright and you want your oculars to be neutral or potentially angled so that you're looking a little bit down. That's very helpful.

And then finally, working with the industry to help redesign our equipment and workflow to be easier on our bodies, I think will be also a really important goal for the next 10 years.

I hope you find some of these tips helpful. RP