Facts About Eye Exams
Your eyes are important tools to help you navigate the world around you. They translate light into electrical pulses that the brain interprets into vision. Eye exams are essential to maintaining healthy eyes and obtaining early diagnosis of serious eye conditions. For the most part, eye exams are simple and painless.
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Your Eyes
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Even though your eyes are not considered vital organs, they are important organs that convey vision. Light enters the eye through the hole in the center, the pupil. It travels through the lens, which focuses the light onto the retina, the receiving structure of the eye. The colored part of your eye is called the iris, and its function is to adjust the pupil's size to get the optimum amount of light. The iris is the reason that your pupils dilate when light is bright, but open when there is not enough light. Like the iris and the lens, the clear outer shell of the eye, the cornea, helps focus the incoming light onto the retina. When light hits the retina, a chain of chemical and electrical reactions occurs, which send information along the optical nerves to the brain, where it is interpreted into vision.
Importance of Eye Exams
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Routine eye exams are important, because they can be the first sign of trouble in your eyes or in the rest of your body. During your eye exam, your health-care provider will check your eyes for common eye conditions, such as eye floaters, color blindness or cataracts. He can monitor your vision as you age and alert you as your eyesight begins to worsen. Your eyes also can show symptoms of other diseases, including cirrhosis, syphilis and hepatitis. The earlier you catch most conditions, the more likely treatment will be successful.
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Preparation
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Before your eye exam, think about any questions you have about your eyes. Many people can get nervous during a medical examination and forget about any concerns they may have had beforehand. Write them down, if you think you might forget them. If you wear contact lenses or eyeglasses, bring them to the appointment. Your health-care provider will want to check your prescription. If you are wearing contacts, be prepared to remove them during the exam.
Routine Exam
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The procedure of your eye exam depends on your medical history and eye conditions. However, most routine eye exams start with the health-care provider just talking to you. He may ask you about your medical history or if you having any trouble with your eyes. In most cases, he will examine the external part of your eyes by shining a bright light into each one. The next step is to measure your vision by asking you to recite numbers or letters on a chart or through a machine. If there are no other concerns, this may be the extent of your eye exam.
Specialty Tests
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Depending on your medical history and any symptoms you are having, other types of tests can be added to a routine eye exam. For example, your health-care provider may perform a color vision testing to determine if you are colorblind. He will show you a multicolored dot pattern with numbers integrated. Colorblind people will not be able to see the numbers.
Another special test is the glaucoma test, which measures the pressure inside your eyes. One way to do this is put orange dye into your eye to make the cornea easier to see and antibiotic drops to protect it from bacteria on the instruments. Your health-care provider will use an instrument to touch and temporarily flatten your cornea and measure how long it takes to return to normal.
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