A student in his 20s walked into an eye clinic in Edinburgh with six days of floaters and occasional flashes of light in his right eye. He had no eye disease beyond mild nearsightedness, no family history of retinal problems, and no memory of any blow to the head.
Then doctors looked at the back of his eyes. Both retinas were bruised and torn. The right eye had a retinal dialysis, a break at the far edge of the retina that clinicians normally associate with serious blunt trauma. The explanation surfaced only after a second round of questions. For about three months he had been pressing a high-frequency percussive massage gun onto and around both eyes, several minutes at a time, once a week, to relieve a feeling of tiredness.
