MANILA, Philippines — Every night before going to bed, you can usually find me reading the book I have chosen for the time being. Aside from the book, I also find myself checking out some short pieces on websites like articles and blog posts on my Android. It was during one of these recent sessions that I came across something interesting but quite disturbing. I decided it will be the subject of my article today.

The article I read was from the website Cracked.com and it was about last resort surgeries that actually worked. One of the entries in the article really struck me because it had something to do with the eyes, since I have vision problems myself.

But it also struck me because of how innovative, strange and disturbing the solution was. It gave me one of those “I didn’t know that was possible” feelings.

When one thinks about eye surgery, we usually think of the usual things like laser surgery and corneal transplants. The most radical we could probably think of transplanting devices to stand in for something in the eye that doesn’t work. If I told you to think about teeth being used for eye surgery, you’ll probably think I’m nuts.

That’s exactly what I thought when I read the article. But back in 2009, that’s exactly what doctors in Florida did to restore vision to woman named Shannon Thornton who became blind due to a rare condition named Stevens-Johnson Syndrome that left the surface of her eye completely damaged.

This tooth in eye surgery is officially called Modified Osteo-odonto-keratoprosthesis or MOOKP for short. Without going into too much detail, this procedure involves extracting the patient’s own tooth and drilling a hole in it so that a prosthetic lens could be placed into it.

The tooth with the lens would then be inserted into the eye and then dental tissue is used to as the new cornea while tissue from the cheek would serve as the mucus tissue around the pupils.

The advantage of using the patient’s own tooth and tissue from the mouth is that there’s less chance that the tooth will be rejected by the immune system while it’s within the eye.

I know a lot of you are probably grossed out by now but remember that the woman can now see because of this radical procedure. This is a great example of several fields of science coming together to solve problems.

We have the field of medicine and biology merging with the field of optics (responsible for all our cameras today) to make an eye work again. You’ve heard of the saying “an eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth” but now you can say you’ve heard about a tooth in the eye!