Many people take their eyes for granted. Your eyesight is essential to almost every aspect of your life. That is why we encourage proactive eye care through frequent eye examinations and keeping up with general health!
Why Are Eye Examinations So Important?
Eye examinations are the foundation of eye care. They help Dr. Alan Mendelsohn and Dr. Nathan Klein to diagnose eye diseases early, keep you seeing your best and drastically lower your chance of disease-related vision loss. Eye examinations are absolutely necessary, yet many people avoid them for years at a time.
Here at Eye Surgeons and Consultants of Hollywood FL, we understand that taking time out of your busy day can be tough. However, we think it’s worth it. Catching issues early on greatly increases your chance of avoiding any permanent damage.
During a comprehensive eye exam, Drs. Mendelsohn and Klein will test your visual acuity, eye movements, look inside of your eye and at your retina, and make sure everything is in working order. Your eye doctor will be able to detect cataracts, macular degeneration, glaucoma, diabetic retinopathy, and a wide array of other common problems. Haven’t had an eye exam in a while? Be sure to schedule your examination with our experts at our Hollywood, FL office!
Taking Care of Your Eyes at Home
The first step to healthy eyes is a healthy lifestyle. Most of these will be obvious, but it is worth reiterating that the health of the rest of your body has a huge impact on your eye health.
You can start being proactive about your eye health today by:
- Eating a healthy diet. This can mean different things for different people. Talk to your doctor or nutritionist to see what kind of diet your should be eating to support your optimal health!
- Quitting your smoking habit! Smoking makes you more likely to develop cataracts, macular degeneration and damage to your optic nerve. What to keep your vision healthy for years to come? Make the steps to kick your smoking habit today!
- Always wearing sunglasses outside. Yes, even when it’s cloudy! Make sure that your eyeglasses have UV400 blocker and polarization on both lens surfaces. This is rarely the case. It is unfair and most unfortunate that most South Floridians, despite wearing sunglasses are essentially “naked” outdoors. This in turn increases the likelihood of eyelid cancers, pingueculas, pterygium, drusen, macular degeneration, and ocular melanomas.
- Limiting your screen time. This can be difficult if your job requires staring at a computer screen all day. However, there are still steps you can take to protect yourself from eyestrain, blurry vision, dry eyes and headaches. Use the 20/20/20 rule – every 20 minutes, look at an object that is 20 feet away for about 20 seconds. This helps offset some of the damage that fixating on a close object for extended periods of time can do.
- Wear eyeglasses with blue blocker. Most importantly however, is to wear eyeglass lenses with blue blocker to reduce digital eye strain and also to prevent/minimize drusen and macular degeneration. The vast majority of glasses utilized for digital devices do not have a blue blocker to minimize blue light emission. Unfortunately, screen savers and the apps currently available for digital devices are woefully inadequate, therefore researchers advocate for ophthalmic lenses that block harmful HEV blue light. This especially true if the individual is utilizing digital devices for a threshold of 30 minutes per day on average cumulatively for all digital devices.
Enhancing Vision for Sports and Exercise
Enhancing vision for sports and exercise can make one more safe, more comfortable, and probably improve your performance as well. For example, those wearing monofocal contact lenses are at a marked competitive disadvantage and should strongly consider the myriad of advantages with multifocal contact lenses. Please watch the embedded video for more information: