Imran Khan's Eye Condition Almost Normal, Jail Authorities Tell Pakistan Supreme Court

Central Retinal Vein Occlusion

The specific diagnosis at the centre of this dispute is central retinal vein occlusion (CRVO) in Khan's right eye, first detected in late January. CRVO is a blockage of the main vein draining the retina and can cause sudden, sometimes irreversible, vision loss if not treated promptly. The fact that jail authorities now describe his vision as "almost normal" is therefore a clinically significant claim — not just a political talking point. Yet the diagnosis itself raises a follow-up question that the Adiala Jail report does not fully address: CRVO often requires ongoing monitoring and, in many patients, long-term management of underlying conditions such as hypertension or diabetes. The article notes that jail medical officers check Khan's blood pressure, heart rate and oxygen levels three times a day, but the public filing offers no comparable baseline for the conditions that may have triggered the eye problem in the first place.

PIMS and Alshifa Trust Eye Hospital

The treatment pathway documented in the court filing runs through two named institutions: the Pakistan Institute of Medical Sciences (PIMS) in Islamabad, whose head of ophthalmology, Dr. Muhammad Arif Khan, treated the former prime minister, and the Alshifa Trust Eye Hospital in Rawalpindi, where vitreoretinal specialist Dr. Nadeem Qureshi was also involved. Laying out a roster of named specialists is a deliberate legal move by the jail administration — it converts what could be dismissed as a bureaucratic assurance into a paper trail of credentialed care. The choice of public-sector PIMS rather than the private Shifa International Hospital, which Khan himself petitioned for, is the heart of the judicial contest. If the three-member bench led by Justice Shahid Waheed accepts the PIMS-based care as adequate, it both rejects Khan's petition and implicitly endorses the state's medical-judicial framework for high-profile prisoners.

Sohail Afridi's December 2025 Claim

The most politically loaded counter-narrative comes from Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Chief Minister Sohail Afridi, who used a press conference to push back against the jail's optimistic report. Afridi cited a medical report showing elevated blood pressure in Khan and contrasted it with earlier readings from Khan's private doctors. He further alleged that Khan's family, legal team and personal physicians have been barred from meeting him since 2 December 2025. Whether or not those claims survive scrutiny, they sharpen the framing the Supreme Court will have to weigh: a state-supplied recovery story on one side, and an opposition-supplied denial-of-access narrative on the other. The bench's decision on 18 August will therefore be read not just as a ruling on a medical petition, but as a signal about how Pakistan's top court balances the rights of high-profile prisoners against the executive's insistence on institutional care.