photograph courtesy the toyos clinic
Top Doctor Spotlight
Editor's Note: Every year, the national medical group Castle Connolly produces a list of the best doctors in America. In the Memphis area, the 2022 Top Doctors list comprises more than 300 physicians representing 60 different specialties. Here, we introduce you to one of the care-givers who have been named a Top Doc time and again.
One of nature’s smallest creatures — mice — helped guide Dr. Rolando Toyos to his medical specialty, and a group of bears ultimately lured him to Memphis.
“Ophthalmology combines general medicine with surgery and is driven by advanced technology that requires mathematical precision,” says Toyos, founder and medical director of the Toyos Clinic. “My research in medical school required me to perform microsurgery on mice, and I fell in love with the fine motor skill required to perform eye surgery.”
And the bears? Years later, the Memphis Grizzlies invited him to be their team physician. His long involvement with sports medicine includes serving as team physician for the Memphis Redbirds and other professional teams around the country, as well as a stint as president of the Sports Ophthalmology Society of America.
Toyos earned a bachelor’s degree from the University of California at Berkeley and a master’s from Stanford. He studied medicine at the University of Illinois, completed his internship in internal medicine at Illinois Masonic Hospital in Chicago, and served his residency at Northwestern.
“I hope my experience opens the door to the next person, who will invent the next technology that will cause a paradigm shift in treatment.” — Dr. Rolando Toyos
In 1998, he founded the Toyos Clinic, when St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital recruited him to oversee the eye care of children at their neonatal intensive-care clinic in Jackson, Tennessee. He came to the Bluff City ten years later, and the Toyos Clinic now has six locations: two in Nashville and one each in Memphis and Franklin, Tennessee, plus Southaven, Mississippi, and New York City.
“The world opened up to me when I invented new technologies and techniques to help my patients,” he says. Each location has three related clinics. The Vision Clinic includes complete medical and surgical eye care. Optical services provide designer eyewear and specialty contact lenses. The Aesthetics Clinic includes skin care, laser resurfacing, and even hair transplantation.
In his work with aesthetics, Toyos discovered a procedure that not only treated skin conditions but helped patients with dry eye disease. This condition, he says, “has been an ignored problem by the medical establishment, and I discovered that Intense Pulsed Light and Low Level Light Therapy could give patients significant relief.” He has authored articles and a book on the procedure and has trained physicians from 33 countries on his latest techniques.
As part of this program, the Toyos Clinic includes a full research department under the supervision of his wife, Dr. Melissa Toyos, also an ophthalmologist.
Dr. Rolando Toyos doesn’t confine his patients to those who can visit his clinics. As part of the Eye Care America Project, his medical teams offer free care to people in need (such as the victims of Hurricane Katrina), and he has completed missions to treat patients at no cost in Haiti, Nicaragua, and Honduras.
The biggest advance Toyos would like to see in ophthalmology “is a change of thinking about new techniques,” noting that he pushed other doctors for years to accept his new treatment for dry eye disease. “I hope my experience opens the door to the next person,” says Toyos, “who will invent the next technology that will cause a paradigm shift in treatment.”
