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Monday 8am - 5pm Tuesday 8am - 5pm Wednesday 8am - 5pm Thursday 8am - 5pm Friday 8am - 5pm

Jorge Calzada, MD

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Southaven, MS
Jorge Calzada, MD

Deep Blue Retina: Ophthalmology clinic specialized in retinal and macular diseases and surgery.

Macular degeneration, diabetic retinopathy, retinal detachments, inflammatory eye conditions and pediatric retina.

02/25/2026

Optimism vs. Cynicism in Medicine: Am I optimistic about the future of healthcare?
Never in the history of medicine have we had the ability to treat, prevent, and even reverse diseases as we do now. The therapeutic pipeline — especially in gene and cell biotechnology — is stronger than ever. Conditions once catastrophic are becoming manageable, even curable. Yet physicians are cynical and pessimistic.
I believe there is a growing disconnect between reality and perception — not only in medicine, but across society.
Overall quality of life continues to rise, yet perceived inequality dominates the narrative. Technology offers promise, but it is intruding into the crevices of our personal lives.
I describe it as a “Dystopian-Utopia”. The Jetsons and Star Trek colliding with hackers, AI bots, and fake beauty accounts on social media. We are surrounded by digital noise that is permeating everything.
In U.S. medicine, our ability to recommend treatments is increasingly constrained by insurance companies in ways that feel deeply intrusive. Cost control is necessary, and we all understand that. But the pervasive insertion of insurers into the daily care of patients erodes professional autonomy and strains the doctor–patient relationship. There is a surge of private equity into healthcare — perhaps a reaction to insurance suffocation.
I think of this new model as “Checkpoint middleman pseudocapitalism.” A system where power does not rest with providers (physicians, hospitals), producers (pharma), or patients but with intermediaries. PBMs, GPOs, MSOs. Acronyms that represent checkpoints in the flow of capital and decision-making. Opaque systems based on legally complex structures that average people cannot comprehend. Distorted and misdirected incentives hidden from plain view.
Healthy capitalism requires transparency and directness, and we are drifting away from both.
The image above has nothing to do with this reflection. It shows the retina of a patient with proliferative diabetic retinopathy and epiretinal fibrovascular proliferation that has contracted, lifting the retina into a tractional detachment. It now requires surgical repair.

04/10/2025

Welcome to our new office location in East Memphis at the Pennmarc Center building across from International Paper campus on Poplar Ave. We are available for new consultations and second opinions.

11/28/2024

Ophthalmology: I am often asked why I chose this particular specialty. Like many decisions in life, there are many influences that mold an important path like a career choice. Depending on who is asking, and depending on how much time I have, I choose to answer with any one of the multiple real factors that influenced my decision. I sometimes bring up my mentor Dr. Barrett Haik, a man that took me under his wing and would take a serious paternal role both teaching me, directing me, or just stopping me from making decisions he did not approve of. I sometimes mention my love of neurosciences, and how the retina is an “approachable part of the brain”, where I envision neural theory and neurological therapies first becoming truly accessible. To an aesthete I may point out how the eye and the retina are curiously beautiful and psychologically powerful in imagery. To others I may explain that retinal microsurgery is both delicate and rewarding, and that by sheer coincidence it has many physical parallels to my early training on the Hammond organ that my mother pushed me on as a child, with seated bimanual surgery and bipedal controls. Sometimes I may mention my great uncle Dr. Esteban Isern, whom I barely met before his dementia waned him, but who was himself a brilliant ophthalmologist and who my own father saw as a paternal figure. Then there are many people and opportunities that aligned in ways I could have not imagined. They all made my early career decisions. But as life proceeds and one faces unforeseen difficulties, these unconnected influences take on the form of pillars to build real foundations upon. While not having Dr. Haik or my father or my great uncle around I can still look upon them and decide to honor them as best as I can by working hard in my career and help my patients and advance our knowledge through clinical research. I guess this is my way of giving thanks to them, and on this Thanksgiving, I felt the need to remember them on this little post.

11/21/2024

Always wonderful to host the engineering and technical team from . As the first center in the world to use Beyeonics augmented reality microscopy in nearly all our retina surgeries, we welcome the new retina centers joining this amazing journey, pushing surgery into the digital immersive era.

01/24/2024

Where do we go from here? It’s been nearly 5 years since we started our retina practice Deep Blue Retina. While we focused on how to create a space for our clinic, brought diagnostic technology and lasers, created a team with the correct talent and attitude, and communicated with the referring doctor community, we have also been working with multiple companies in the surgical technology field. The question we are trying to answer is what we can do to improve our patients’ conditions that we are not doing right now, and how can we partner with technological innovators to help mold and direct that future. Next week I will be in Miami at a conference discussing how virtual and augmented reality can be incorporated in medicine and surgery. We have an accumulated experience of nearly 300 surgeries performed with the augmented reality microscope from . Will this technology and others similar become turning points in surgery? Clearly technology is only as good as how it is utilized by the nurses, surgeons and technicians. But it is our imagination that will lead us into the future.

06/05/2023

It has been nearly 4 years since the start of our clinic project Deep Blue Retina. We are very proud to be included for the second year in a row on the Memphis Magazine Top Doctors list! It has been a lot of hard work, and it is wonderful to feel the support and recognition of our community!

05/08/2023

Should the old techniques be scrapped forever? One of the pitfalls of modern minimally invasive surgery, in nearly every surgical field, is that advanced techniques have (fortunately) replaced large incision approaches. This is a huge benefit for our patients. But surgical trainees lose the exposure on the traditional approaches during their training, and often never develop the skills required to perform these procedures. While uncommon, there are always patients that require larger incision craniotomies, thoracotomies and laparotomies due to their pathologies. On the photo of this post I show a very dense cataract that could not be removed with small incision ultrasonic removal. I was able to grasp the lens from the retinal surface and extract it through a large limbal incision, using old “extracapsular cataract surgery” wound construction and suturing. I worry that some of these techniques may be lost over time. Certainly, the instruments are not being regularly purchased. In this patient when I was about to remove the lens I asked for a “lens loop” only to find out I had to figure out how to use other instruments for the same effect.

01/17/2023

Scleral infoldings from severe hypotony: Normal physiologic function of the eye requires the
intraocular pressure to remain within a normal range. Low intraocular pressure, particularly
when chronic, presents with the typical hypotony syndrome, which includes choroidal effusions
and macular edema. Acute hypotony can, on the other hand, present with collapse of the globe
with infoldings of the sclera. The photo presented above, which resembles Salvador Dali’s
melted clocks in “La Persistencia de la Memoria”, was taken immediately after vitrectomy
surgery on a patient with panuveitis. The patient had a small leak through a surgical sclerotomy
and the intraocular pressure was less than 2 mmHg. Eyes with history of chronic uveitis can
have reduced fluid production from the ciliary body and are at risk of post-surgical hypotony.
We elected to place a shield on the eye and hold off on ocular manipulation, with normalization
of intraocular pressure and anatomy within 3 days. Sometimes, we should not attempt to fight
surrealism lest we be dragged into a nightmarish dimension in surgery.
Welcome to the new year 2023! I for one expected a slow start to the year and have yet again
found myself as busy as I could have ever imagined. I keep on promising to reengage in my
medical social media posts yet work and life keep me otherwise occupied. I do have multiple
plans that I have been working on, and hopefully I will be able to execute them in the upcoming
weeks. In the meantime, let’s keep on working.

12/17/2022

Sclopetaria: This photo demonstrates severe intraocular scarring with retinal damage following blunt
trauma to the eye. Rather than discuss the pathology or the management of this unfortunate patient, I
just wanted to share the eerie beauty of retinal photography. Without context, this image could be a scifi extraterrestrial landscape.

12/08/2022

Diminishing returns? A big part of recommending surgical and medical interventions lies in an honest calculation of risk/benefit ratios. Evidence-based studies are the correct way to gather the data required to make those analysis. Unfortunately, there are situations where we do not yet have the correct data to provide a proper risk/benefit analysis. While evidence-based medicine studies utilize statistics on pools of patients, they cannot specifically predict anything for a particular individual patient. Some pieces of information may be unavailable or not easily comparable numerically. For example, different surgeons may have different personal outcomes, and even individual surgeons may have different outcomes in different settings. A patient has innumerable idiosyncrasies, from genetic factors, to environmental, to presentation at different moments of evolution of a disease process. Of course, it is a stated goal of modern medicine to study, gather and analyze as much data as possible on patient outcomes with different therapeutic modalities and to constantly shrink the information gap. But a future goal does not answer all the questions we may have for the patient we see tomorrow in our office or hospital. Ultimately, it is part of our responsibility as physicians to give our best opinion and recommendations even despite all the uncertainties that we may face. This is where training, experience and observational skills combine into medical intuition that allows us to recommend a best course of action. When you see the photo above, what do you actually see? How does your brain process that image? As a surgeon, I immediately start looking at three-dimensional dissection planes. How would I approach it? Will it improve vision? What caveats will I encounter? Is it worth attempting it? All these thoughts are immediate, non-verbal, and intuitive, like Gladwell described in his book Blink. I am not arguing against evidence-based medicine. Instead, I am advocating for all doctors to engage on a deliberate process of professional improvement, to develop that intuitive medical impression, and fill the inherent gaps of modern medicine.

11/15/2022

Embracing new technologies: There are many compromises we need to take during the course of our surgical careers. Once the initial learning curve of performing complex surgeries and training am operating room team is overcome, it is too easy to avoid making changes to a well functioning system. On the one hand, we have to strive to improve outcomes and decrease complications by sharpening our skills and processes to the finest grain. Introduction of new technology can actually make that process of continuous improvement difficult, since it involves large shifts rather than small incremental changes. This is important, nevertheless. We have to focus on the future of medicine in addition to the daily improvements. That is how we will ultimately reach goals that at this point may appear unreachable.

11/03/2022

DBR is gene therapy ready! After months of hard work we have received all the certifications required to start gene therapy studies. The future of retina!

Address

7900 Airways Boulevard, Bldng A, Ste 1
Southaven, MS
38671

Opening Hours

Monday	8am - 5pm
Tuesday	8am - 5pm
Wednesday	8am - 5pm
Thursday	8am - 5pm
Friday	8am - 5pm

Telephone

+19015226520

Website

http://DeepBlueRetina.com/

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