What Your Eye Doctor Is Looking Out For During An Eye Exam
While most people know that a regular visit to the eye doctor is recommended, very few people know exactly why. Most people assume that the main purpose of the visit is to check for short-sightedness and whether your prescription needs to be corrected. While this does form the most obvious part of a visit to your optometrist, it is far from the most important purpose of the visit.
During any proper eye examination, eye doctors are looking for much more than simply evidence of short-sightedness and to what degree a prescription might need to be corrected. In fact, this is usually a secondary concern for them. Instead, they are checking for any signs or symptoms of more serious diseases and conditions that affect the eyes. Moreover, there are many other serious diseases that do not directly affect the eyes cause telltale signs to appear in the eyes, and there have been studies showing that more serious diseases are detected during eye examinations than in any other type of regular medical examination.
One condition that requires a doctor trained in vision healthcare to detect is Amblyopia, otherwise known as ‘lazy eye’. This refers to a situation in which one eye has a very different prescription from the other. The brain naturally begins to rely more heavily on the eye with the lower prescription, as it requires less effort to decipher images from that eye, being less blurry. Left untreated, the eye with the higher prescription will experience impaired vision, which can become permanent. In order to treat Amblyopia, your doctor will prescribe a patch to be worn over the more active eye, thus forcing your body to make use of the ‘lazier’ eye, thereby training your brain to start making use of that eye again.
Another important part of a proper eye examination is checks for eye diseases. There are a large number of severe eye diseases that do not display any obvious symptoms, and without professional diagnosis, you would be unlikely to identify any of these eye diseases at an early stage. By the time the symptoms become obvious enough to be easily recognizable, it is probably too late to prevent at least some form of permanent damage to your eyes.
Eye examinations are therefore important times when eye doctors perform thorough and comprehensive checks on both the internal and external areas of your eyes, looking for any telltale signs of early development of an eye disease. Innumerable people have had their vision saved thanks to early diagnosis of dangerous eye diseases during regular eye examinations and early treatment.
While it may not seem like it, your eyes are also very much connected with the rest of your body. Many diseases that affect the rest of the body, such as high blood pressure and high blood cholesterol levels manifest early symptoms in the eyes. Eye doctors are able to identify the onset of such conditions by examining the blood vessels and other parts of the eyes.
These are the signs and symptoms that your eye doctor is looking out for every time you go for an eye examination, and it is entirely possible that your optometrist will someday save your vision or even your life during your regular eye examination, so you should never neglect to schedule and go for those examinations.
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