Posts Tagged ‘Optician’

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The Fear Factor

Wednesday, August 11th, 2010

People can be very squeamish about eyes, and of course frightened of losing their sight. As we age, other health issues can escalate and visiting the Optician is yet another appointment to worry about. The most common eye conditions that affect the over 60’s can however be treated if caught early, so don’t delay, keep up to date with your check ups and take action on any problems.

Statistics suggest that up to a quarter of a million people living in Britain risk blindness from undiagnosed Glaucoma, a disease which can often be successfully treated with drops. Some patients need surgery, but treatment is straightforward and preferable to losing your sight. As there are no symptoms that the patient is aware of initially, it’s important to attend for regular eye tests.

Cataracts occur when the crystalline lens within the eye becomes opaque. It can result from trauma, UV exposure, or simply ageing. It’s easily treated by surgery, but 25% of people suffering from blindness over the age of 75 have Cataracts, and this could be corrected. Annually in the UK the NHS is responsible for over 300,00 Cataract surgeries.

ARMD – Age Related Macular Degeneration – is the commonest cause of blindness in the Western World. In the UK it affects the lives of over 600,000 people. Monitoring by your Optician can spot the earliest signs, when changes to diet and dietary supplements can help to control the condition. The very fast progress of the wet form of the disease needs immediate treatment, so early detection is essential.

Dry Eye Syndrome is the commonest form of eye irritation in the over 65s, leading to discomfort and problems with vision. There are various therapies which can deal the symptoms, no patient needs to suffer without trying different remedies and drug regimes.

If you have an elderly relative make sure they can visit the optician, or arrange a home visit. Even if eye conditions can’t be treated then solutions such as low vision aids might make a significant difference to the daily life, and everyone should take advantage of any treatments available.

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One for All!

Monday, July 19th, 2010

I didn’t need glasses until my early forties, when my previously perfect sight let me down and suddenly I couldn’t see to read. I could still manage if I squinted and held things at arm’s length, but obviously this became somewhat impractical as time went on and one day my poor tired arms simply became too short! The optician told me this happens to everyone but to be honest this was wasn’t much of a comfort! So I ended up gradually collecting glasses to help in different situations.

I had reading glasses, and after a nightmare meeting when I ended up with a raging headache and very tired arms when I forgot my specs, I started keeping one pair at work, one at home, and one in the car just in case! Then I started to need help for the computer, and couldn’t really see the dash board clearly either. This meant another pair of computer specs for work, one for home, and one for the car! This worked until I’d go home with the work pair in my bag etc and then end up with all of them in the wrong location! Then of course there were my sunglasses, which I wore for driving, but still couldn’t see the dashboard.

Exhausted by all of this, and fed up with my worn out glasses that got squashed in handbags and were constantly bent, I went back to talk to the optician again. I still didn’t need glasses for distance sight, but we decided that the time had come to go for varifocal specs. The advantage for me was huge – one pair of glasses that I could leave on all the time, so they wouldn’t get worn out or left anywhere. I could also have them going dark in the sunshine, so instead of seven pairs of specs scattered around my life, I had one pair that I could keep on for all situations!

This was life changing! My varifocals let me see to drive, at the computer, the dashboard, and all my close up vision. I don’t have to take them off and they’re always with me. The lens goes dark so I don’t need sunglasses, and they are clear when I’m indoors. The lenses looked expensive when I first got a quote, but of course they were less than my vast collection of specs and look an awful lot nicer!

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Look me in the Eye…..

Thursday, July 8th, 2010

With growing awareness of body language and eye contact, nowadays we’re more conscious than ever of the importance of how we come across to others. The pressure is increased even further if you suffer from an eye condition that affects the way you look, especially when it comes to the super sensitive issue of your eyes.

One of the most common problems patients suffer from is lazy eye, or  as people often call it. One eye wanders and does not focus as with as normal eye. This can make it difficult for other people to tell where you are looking. It can be successfully operated on, so do bring it up with your optician, it may be possible for you to be referred to the hospital eye service for assessment.

Cosmetic problems with the coloured part of the eye, the Iris, are more unusual. We have patients with different coloured eyes, or with a segment of the Iris missing. This can be treated with coloured contact lenses, which we can use to match the different colours, or to disguise a gap in the Iris. This can produce excellent results without resorting to surgery.

Ptosis is a term which covers drooping lids due to muscle defects. The muscles which control the eyelids are a complex mechanism and any difficulties with the system can impair vision if the lids droop down across the eye. Surgery can help in some cases, or you can have a slim metal prop attached to your specs which lifts the faulty lid.

Any of these issues may also be helped when it comes to changing your specs – small and fashionable frames, possibly with a light tint will give your more confidence and a small measure of camouflage. It’s never to late to look into solutions for these problems, and new techniques may give you options now that weren’t possible a few

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Double Check

Wednesday, July 7th, 2010

As we all know, seeing the optician is about more than whether you need correction for your sight – it’s also an opportunity to have your eye health and some general health issues checked out. The full eye examination is a blend of discussion with patients, using equipment and the optician’s knowledge and expertise. A common query from patients is that they worry if anything has been missed, or if their responses to the optician’s questions were the right ones. So here’s a comforting thought – the examination is a series of double and triple checks and we have several ways of diagnosing any problems.

When it comes to your prescription, and the confusing question of – which is better, number 1 or number 2? – Patients often worry that gave the wrong answer, and they won’t be able to see with their glasses! The first thing you should know is that every time the optician asks you the 1 or 2 question they are re-checking and refining results over and over again. They also use the information of your age, previous prescriptions and general eye health to make sure your results look logical. Some opticians also use Retinoscopy, a hand held instrument reads your prescription and gives them a valuable starting point and double check.

The puff of air test reads the internal pressure of the eye, as high pressure can be a sign of Glaucoma. But we don’t just rely on that reading – the optician also examines the area around the Optic nerve head to check for signs of Glaucoma too. Again your age and comparison to previous results gives extra reassurance.

By questioning you on your general health and that of your family, discussing your lifestyle and looking at your eye health history, opticians build up a picture of potential problems. Your standard of vision also gives clues. Ophthalmoscopy is the use of another hand held instrument that checks eye health, giving opticians the opportunity to look right inside the eye and check for signs of Retinal problems, Glaucoma, and Cataract. Retinal Imaging Cameras give a different view and allow us to store results so we can refer back to them.

A mix of experience, knowledge, training and different techniques give us masses of information about your eyes and health, so don’t worry that we’ll miss anything or that your response might not have been the right one. Your optician sees everything – and double checks it.

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Healthy Eyes Check List

Friday, June 25th, 2010

We all know that we need to take regular exercise and eat healthily to look after our bodies. There are screening programmes run by the NHS and lots of advice in the media about illness and wellness that help us to maintain good general health. More specifically, what can you do make sure our eyes are healthy? In your every day life, is there anything you can do? Here are our top five tips to ensure you have done all you can to safeguard your sight:

1.    Protect your eyes – wear safety shields or safety specs for dangerous jobs and follow health and safety guidelines at work. Speak to your HR department if you don’t think you have proper protective equipment. Wear UV protection outdoors, which can be a sunspec tint or clear UV coat, especially if you have light coloured eyes or a family history of Macular degeneration. Sunglasses should have the British Standards mark BS EN 1836 to prove they give full UV protection.

2.    Maintain Healthy Eyes – stop smoking! It’s a proven cause of cataract and Macular Degeneration. Eat a varied diet rich in green leafy vegetables and a mixture of different coloured fruits, salads, and veg. Ask your optician about retinal imagining, which will show up the earliest signs of disease. Nutritional supplements may help to prevent or halt symptoms.

3.    Be Aware – Ask around about your relative’s eye health history to make sure there are no hereditary diseases you should know about. If there is Glaucoma in your immediate family your eye tests will be free of charge when you’re over forty. If you suddenly develop any symptoms – flashing lights, blurred vision, floaters or eye pain you must be checked immediately. Although these often have simple explanations they can, in rare cases, be indicators of more serious problems.

4.    Visit Your Optician – Get into the routine of regular check ups, they’re equally important if you have glasses, contact lenses or no prescription at all. Your optician can keep a check on your sight and the health of your eye, as well as picking up some general health problems. They can refer you to the Hospital Eye Service or your GP for further treatment, and monitor results.

5.    Look After Your Eye Wear – Always wear your up to date prescription and follow instructions to the letter about contact lens care. Never over wear lenses or use solutions other than those suggested by your practitioner. Look after your specs to keep coatings, lenses and frames in tip-top condition. Scratches and blemishes on lenses may interfere with your sight and cause problems in conditions such as low light.

Prevention is always better than cure, and these simple steps will ensure you are doing all you can to maintain your precious gift of sight.

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Learning to Love my Specs

Thursday, May 20th, 2010

I’ve been wearing glasses for about twenty years now, since my mid-teens. This is probably the worst time in a person’s entire life-span to become a speccy four eyes, just when every single cell of your body is causing you dread and angst! At least the glasses gave me something tangible to focus (!) my immense hatred on!

I could quite cheerfully have punched the optician when he cheerfully announced that my borderline prescription had tipped over into full blown short sightedness, and I needed glasses. The sulks over the next few weeks were immense! I hid them at the bottom of my rucksack and only dragged them out if my life depended on it. Quite often it really did, as I narrowly missed getting hit by cyclists and small children and wandered into roads thinking I was still on the pavement.

In my twenties I got contact lenses, and the world was changed into 3D and a landscape with birds flying, buildings with bricks etc. The real shock has been the last couple of years, when I’ve gradually drifted back into wearing specs. This new love affair started when I saw a Marc Jacobs frame and was instantly smitten. It was shiny black with sexy curvy sides, and with my chunky fringe and power bob I was transformed into an intellectual and serious force to be reckoned with. I’ve now become addicted to spex, with ten pairs in an array of colours doing all the work for me when it comes to accessorising.

I wish I’d done it years ago, as lenses were never perfectly comfortable on me and I was always smudging my makeup and fiddling with my eyes. So I’ve made peace with my myopia and at least I have an excuse to splurge on Designer fashion!

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You’ve Got the Power!

Wednesday, May 19th, 2010

A great mystery which we often have to help you all unravel is the prescription that your optician gives you, the power or strength of your lenses. So let’s start at the beginning and give you some background information on what those scribbled numbers mean!

The lens power is written in a unit of measurement called a Dioptre, and it’s all about the focal length of your lenses. Your first task when sending it to us is to make sure your Optician has written it clearly! Bless them – they’re as bad as Doctors! So check with your Optician if you’re not sure.

The top line of the prescription box is the power of your lenses for distance. This covers TV, walking around, driving and general wear. Then you will have intermediate and reading strengths. Reading is for very close work and small detail, like threading a needle and reading. Intermediate is for large print at arm’s length, so computer screen and reading music.

Now for the science bit!

Sph is short for sphere power, which is your amount of short or long sightedness. The higher the number, the more correction you need. It has a plus sign if you’re long sighted, minus for short.

Cyl is short for cylinder, and this is the amount of astigmatism you have. It simply means that your eye is shaped more like a Rugby ball, so you need one power to correct the long part of the Rugby ball, and one for the short. Again, there will be a plus or minus sign.

Axis is the angle of your Rugby ball! As it’s an angle don’t bother looking for a plus or minus sign!

If you don’t have an astigmatism then both the cyl and axis boxes will be empty.

Add is the extra power you need for reading, and we add it on to your distance prescription. An add power is usually the same for both eyes.

Prism is relatively unusual, and this makes your two eyes work together.

So there you go, a little bit of extra knowledge, but all you have to worry about is copying it down for us, and we’ll do the rest!

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Keep it in the Family

Friday, May 14th, 2010

Within families it’s interesting to see what lovely traits get passed on from generation to generation. Knobbly knees? An obsession with train spotting? Freckles? We can look back at family photos and spot the likenesses, which can be a bonding moment and at the very least, quite interesting. But what if knowing about your family history could save your sight?

Like any other physical trait, eye conditions can be inherited. There are two important things to do here. Firstly, know your family history, and ask questions about any eye health issues. Patients come in and vaguely say that Great Grandma had funny specs, but it doesn’t help us in monitoring your eye health. Secondly, make sure you tell your optician what you find out! Pass on any information, and check if you need more regular eye tests. For instance, if you’re over forty and a close relative has Glaucoma, then you should have a test every year, which is free under the NHS.

Some eye problems are down to anatomy, so this could be an inherited trait just like eye or hair colour. Long or short sightedness, lazy eye, Glaucoma are just some of the problems that Mum or Dad may have kindly passed onto you! Age Related Macular Degeneration is more likely to occur if you have every light coloured eyes, so wear good quality sunglasses, have regular Retinal Imaging to check for early signs, and take an eye health supplement.

While your Optician is always on the look out for early signs of eye disease, knowing your family history gives you an extra advantage in knowing about early symptoms and preventative measures. Take your children for regular sight tests and pass on medical history. Don’t forget to tell your siblings if any problems arise – they’ll appreciate the advance warning too.

So even though you don’t want to keep health problems in the family, keeping the information there might just save someone’s sight.

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Great Expectations

Thursday, May 13th, 2010

Obviously you can’t please all of the people all of the time, and we do get glasses returned to us because clients aren’t happy with them. Fortunately it’s a really tiny percentage, and often with a bit of adjustment or explanation the specs go back home and give many years of happy sight! The main problem that we have to contend with is the unrealistic expectations of the client. We wish we could perform miracles of Physics but sadly we can’t! So what are the main problems that we would solve if we were granted Super-Powers?!

The No-Effort Varifocal – Varifocals are wonderful lenses that give you back vision at all distances. They let you see near, far, and everywhere in between without swapping specs. The only drawback is that you so have to work with them, and compromise. You have to turn your head a little more to look to the side, you have to drop your chin slightly to see in the distance, and you have to get used to them when you first get them! Persevere, buy the best you can afford, and be grateful you don’t have to change glasses every time you try to focus at a different distance!

Wafer Thin Lenses – You can get lenses in thin material nowadays, but the higher your prescription, the more substance you have to your lens. You also get visible rings around the edges of the lens, which increase with stronger lenses. Brutal though it sounds, you have to be realistic. If your prescription is higher than minus 10 or plus 8, the strength is tricky to disguise. We can use the thinnest material possible, we can add coatings to reduce the rings, but your specs will never look as if there is no power there. Any optician who tells you otherwise is raising false hopes! So be thankful that you can reduce thickness by up to 60%, and be happy with the knowledge that lens materials are improving all the time, and we’ll do everything we can to make them look as good as possible for you.

Reading Specs That Focus Far Away – The magnifying power of your reading glasses is in inverse proportion to the focal length – in plain English, the more they magnify, the closer to your eye you’ll have to hold things! So for very fine detail you have to hold things close too, for bigger print you can have a weaker lens that focuses further away. If you need to see detail at near and far, you need to move yourself closer!

So there are our three wishes, if our Fairy-Godmother pops up any time soon, we’ll be as happy as our clients to get this little lot sorted!

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The Perfect Pupil!

Friday, May 7th, 2010

If the eyes are the windows to our souls, are our pupils are the very gateway to our inner most thoughts?  They allow others to see right inside us – good news if you’re an optician!  The pupil is just a space, but the various structures inside the eye absorb light, so we see it as a velvet black circle, that reacts to pain, emotion, and more practically, light.

The pupil allows us to have comfortable vision on the brightest of days, as it constricts down and allows only the essential amount of light in. This prevents harmful UV from reaching the delicate tissues within the eye. It’s dangerous to wear tinted glasses that don’t give UV protection, because the dark tint will fool the pupil into not constricting, and UV will flood in.

The coloured part of our eye, the Iris, is a ring of smooth muscle that surrounds the pupil, doing the work in dilating and constricting. The sensory path of each iris is linked, so normally if one pupil is stimulated then both will react. At it’s smallest the pupil goes down to about 3 millimetres, at it’s largest up to 9mm. Pupil size alters with age as well as the constant changes mentioned above.

Control of pupil size and our response to seeing the change in others is all involuntary. Research has shown that we find faces with larger pupils more attractive, because looking at us with their dilated pupils we get the message that we’re attractive to them. If we see a downcast expression with small pupils we perceive it as a sad face, and our pupils constrict down too. All this going on without us really being aware of it!

The pupil is a miracle of engineering, and can flag up a warning sign of potential health problems. Pupils that don’t react together, or don’t react normally to light can be a sign of illness or disease, so always get it checked out.

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