Passions
Life outside the clinic
I — The Fairway
Golf
Focus, patience and precision — rehearsed in daylight.
He plays regularly and takes it seriously, and he is perfectly open about why the game holds him. Golf asks for exactly the three qualities that govern a good operating list: sustained concentration across several hours, patience with a process that punishes any attempt to hurry it, and an acceptance that precision is the only currency that counts.
The parallel is not merely poetic. A golf shot, like an incision, is determined almost entirely before it happens — in the read of the lie, the choice of club, the address, the rehearsal. By the time the movement begins, the outcome has largely been decided. What remains is the discipline not to interfere with it.
The course is also indifferent to intention, which he regards as usefully humbling. A shot is struck correctly or it is not; no amount of seniority alters the result. It is one of the few environments outside theatre in which nothing exists beyond the next deliberate movement, and he protects the time accordingly.
Both disciplines punish the same thing: the urge to rush a movement you have not finished thinking about.
II — The Screen
Cinema & Culture
A professional interest in where the eye is asked to look.
His interest in film is long-standing and unusually technical. What draws him is composition: how a frame is built, where a director chooses to place the eye, what is deliberately left just outside the light. A career spent reading visual fields and judging proportion turns out to be excellent preparation for watching a film closely, and he makes no apology for the overlap.
He is drawn in particular to cinematography and to the work of editors — the two crafts whose success is measured, like eyelid surgery, by how thoroughly they escape notice. A cut that the audience feels has usually failed.
His prominence within professional and cultural circles means his name appears with some regularity on the guest list for exclusive red-carpet premieres. He attends them chiefly for the films, and generally leaves before the party. Bringing a surgeon’s sharp eye to the silver screen, Mohamed occasionally shares his unique perspectives on cinema as a guest writer and reviewer for Celluloid Score.
III — The Page
Writing & Review
A low tolerance for bad information reaching people who cannot check it.
The same instinct that makes him a College Tutor makes him a reviewer. Most people researching an eye condition are doing so frightened, at night, on a phone — and a great deal of what they find is written by someone with no clinical training and a commercial interest in the answer.
He advises and reviews for Eye Health Guide, a public eye-health resource publishing surgeon-reviewed condition explainers and symptom guidance in plain language, and contributes toHealthAnswers, which produces plain-English UK health guidance grounded in NHS and NICE recommendations.
Neither is glamorous work. Both are, in his view, closer to the point of the job than anything said at a premiere.
All editorial workIV — The Point Of It
Why any of it matters
There is a version of the consultant surgeon who does nothing else, and it is not a version that ages well. Concentration of the kind ophthalmic surgery requires is a finite resource; it has to be replenished somewhere, by something absorbing but inconsequential.
Golf and cinema serve that purpose, and the humanitarian work supplies the counterweight — a standing reminder of what the specialty is actually for, some distance from a clinic in West Yorkshire. Patients tend to notice the difference in the room. A surgeon with somewhere else to be, and something else to think about, is generally a calmer one.
Global eye missionsThe Clinical Practice
Looking for an appointment, not an anecdote?
Consultations, treatment information, pricing and referrals are handled entirely through the practice site, with clinics at Spire Elland Hospital and Newmedica in Bradford and Huddersfield.