It’s National Non-Smoking Week!!
Smoking tobacco harms every organ in your body— your eyes included. Some things are out of your control… but smoking is the number one modifiable cause of disease in Canada! This is within your control.
Quitting smoking is the number one thing you can do to your risk for getting macular degeneration, which can cause severe vision loss.
Learn more here https://opto.ca/health-library/Smoking-and-Your-Eyes
It’s more than just an eye exam – it’s a checkup of your overall health! ❤️ Start the New Year strong with a visit
to the optometrist and #BeSeenIn2020 👀
It’s Time to Visit Your Optometrist
When thinking of a New Year’s resolution consider the health of your eyes.
Booking an eye exam is a simple resolution that, easy to keep — and it can help protect more than just your vision, but your overall health and wellness too. Let, look at why you should be seen by your optometrist in 2020.
1. It’s About More Than Just Your Vision: The importance of regular eye exams goes well beyond just making sure your vision isn’t blurry. Of course assessing and correcting vision issues is important particularly as we age, but your optometrist is also trained to look at the health of your eyes and can properly diagnose and treat many types of eye disease.
2. Early Detection of Eye Diseases and Conditions: Even if you don’t use prescription eyewear, regular eye exams are still important. Eye diseases can creep up on you with little warning for example, glaucoma and macular degeneration — two of the leading causes of blindness in Canada — show no signs or symptoms until it’s too late. With regular eye exams, optometrists can help detect and treat conditions early, before they lead to permanent vision loss.
3. Detection of Health Problems in Other Areas of the Body: Not only can an optometrist detect changes in your eyes that may indicate a problem you haven’t even noticed, but they can also detect systemic diseases that aren’t yet showing obvious symptoms like cancer, diabetes or high blood pressure. In fact, your optometrist can often detect these health problems before your family doctor!
4. Preserve Vision to Stay Independent and Safe: Losing your ability to see can greatly affect your daily life. It can make regular activities difficult and lead to social isolation, early retirement, and placement into a long-term care home. Vision loss can also increase the risk of falls and injuries. With the help of your optometrist, you can maintain your vision, be independent, and stay safe.
5. Your Optometrist The Ontario Association of Optometrists recommends adults have a comprehensive eye exam every one to two years, or as recommended by their optometrist. For those 65 and over, exams are covered under OHIP every 12 months.
Your eye exam is not a scam. Glasses and contact lenses are medical devices.
When you notice a change in your vision, it can be caused by a host of other things. For example, I’ve seen…
– patients who were unaware that they had diabetes, but were diagnosed based on the appearance of the retina at the back of their eyes
– patients who didn’t know they had high blood pressure, but again were diagnosed after an eye exam
– a patient who thought she had dry eye, and was using drops suggested by the pharmacist, but it turned out to be an inflammatory eye condition linked with thyroid disease
– patients with retinal holes which required laser surgery to prevent retinal detachment
– 2 patients that came in for a routine exam, but ended up having an eye tumour 🙈
On the less “scary” side, I’ve seen plenty of people after they tried to order a higher powered contact lens themselves, thinking they needed something stronger, but they did it incorrectly and ended up giving themselves a headache. Or they ordered glasses online after modifying their glasses prescription a bit and couldn’t see out of the new ones. I’ve seen TONs of people with burning, itchy, red eyes who tried to self-medicate with over-the-counter antibiotic drops, which didn’t help. Do you really trust yourself to know what you need without going to the doctor? Your optometrist is not just a barrier to getting glasses… we’re here to help you take care of your eyes and catch preventable causes of vision loss! 👀 Eye exams might seem simple when everything is going well, but it takes years of training for me to rule out eye disease and other more sinister causes of a prescription change.
This author as simply upset because he was too unprepared to have spare glasses or contact lenses. If you use medication, it’s your own responsibility to have a supply wherever you go. It’s NOT a local doctor’s job to give it to you, sight unseen. Don’t be a statistic in preventable vision loss!
The main takeaway from this should be to make sure you always have a backup pair of glasses 🤓
Yascha Mounk – It is very irresponsible to encourage people to risk their eye health like this
(This is a response to the article The Great American Eye-Exam Scam in the Atlantic )
One simple thing you can do to prevent an appointment backup is always let us know if you need to cancel/change your appointment, and call ahead if you know you’re going to be late!
Read this article: Why patient no-shows have a ‘huge ripple effect’ on the health-care system
Dr Lee recently completed the online course Concussion: prevention, detection and management (a collaboration between University of Calgary Faculty of Kinesiology and Université Laval Faculty of Medicine).
Concussion is such a complex injury and the recommendations and guidelines for best practice are still changing. There is so much to learn about how to address each patient’s individual needs.