Eye Health

Every visit with a patient is an opportunity to teach them about the different aspects of eye health. By encouraging regular eye examinations, I can reinforce basic wellness tips to help keep my patients’ eyes healthy and reduce the possibility of vision loss.

One month into 2017 and the eye care industry has hit the ground running. Here are just a few articles that caught our eye this month.

The temperature is dropping, it’s getting darker earlier and nothing sounds better than snuggling up by the fire with hot chocolate and a book. Yes, winter is coming! From more time spent inside to trying to keep the wind from whipping snow in your eyes, the return of winter weather brings with it hazards that you may have forgotten about over the course of the last year. Before you hit the slopes or start building snowmen, it’s a good idea to prepare your eyes for the risks that come with seasonal changes in weather and activities.

This November, we are bringing awareness to National Diabetic Eye Disease Month. Diabetes affects 380 million people worldwide and is a leading cause of kidney failure, amputations, heart failure, stroke, and most pertinent, blindness. Defined by the inability of the body to produce or process insulin correctly, resulting in higher than normal blood sugar¹, diabetes has three classifications:

• Type 1: The pancreas does not produce insulin.
• Type 2: The body doesn’t process insulin correctly.
• Gestational: A pregnant woman’s body does not produce insulin or use the insulin it needs correctly. It can occur in women who have never had diabetes and typically goes away after the baby is born.

If you have any type of diabetes, you may be at risk of developing diabetic eye disease.

Now that October is here, Halloween is fast approaching and winter will be following tight on its heels. But before the deluge of merriment and its accompanying housecleaning and decorating activities begins, you should consider celebrating another fall occasion: Eye Injury Prevention Month!

Fall is a time of damp streets and changing colors, when the bright pinks and oranges of spring and summer give way to the rusts and ambers of falling leaves. So if all those vibrant, pollen-filled plants are gone and even the trees are giving up, you might be wondering, “why the heck am I still sneezing!?”

Now that it’s October, we’ll be celebrating Eye Injury Prevention month, but before we do that, let’s look at another important subject: eye injuries in sports. Prevent Blindness America designates September as Sports Eye Safety Month.  

In the first part of our series on dry eye disease, we discussed the many causes of the condition. Now we’ll turn our focus to the symptoms that sufferers are likely to experience and how proper diagnosis is key to your treatment regimen.

August is National Eye Exam Month, and I know what you might be thinking: gee… thrilling! In terms of excitement, it’s not exactly National Frisbee Day or National Skydiving Week, but think for a moment about what you need to participate in either of those. Give up? It’s healthy eyes!

In our last post about children’s eye health, we focused on the importance of regular eye exams. As we near the end of Prevent Blindness America’s (PBA) Children’s Eye Health and Safety Month, we turn to keeping eyes safe at home.