Jean Toomer had his reasons for saying, “No eyes that have seen beauty ever lose their sight,” otherwise ophthalmologists or eye doctors, as we popularly refer to them, would have gone jobless a long time back.
The human body, with time and physical exertion, falls prey to a host of bodily ailments which can hamper our day to day activities to the point of rendering us almost inactive. One of the most dreaded of these, considered by some, are eye problems that one has to face, sometimes throughout his life. Having healthy eyesight ensures not only more job posts in careers, but also assures your self of a confidence of being able to trust what you see with your eyes.
Suppose your eye muscles become weak or the lens starts malfunctioning due to multifarious reasons, you need to go to a doctor to find out how to remedy the situation. And since the medicinal industry has been elevated to the status of a purchasable commodity, it pays to research a bit about the medical procedures that you will invest your hard earned money in. Then you’ll know that not only is your money in safe hands, but what exactly is being done with your eyes.
Retinoscopy is the preliminary investigation most people have to undergo when they go for a thorough eye check up. You will be sitting in a light dimmed room and will be asked to focus on a large sized letter located some distance away on the wall. Then the doctor will shine a light on your eyes and change the lenses in the machine placed in front of your eye. This allows the doctor to prepare an approximate prescription which can be further bettered by means of the refraction technique.
Nowadays many doctors conduct the refraction exam by means of either analog phoropters or automatic instruments like auto refractors or aberrometers. While the phoropter involves a doctor showing you a series of lenses to accurately focus on some gibberish text located faraway, the aberrometer allows a spot of light or image to focus on your retina and measure the distances to calculate your eye power. While the aberrometer has supports for you to rest your chin on, the phoropter is generally considered more accurate since the automatic or digital instruments are prone to errors in calculations arising out of circuit problems. Old is gold.
The better eye doctors go for a combination of both the auto refractors and phoropters to determine whether you are suffering from farsightedness, near sightedness, astigmatism or presbyopia.
It may so happen that the above tests fail to diagnose the problem with your ocular apparatus. Under those circumstances, the doctors conduct extensive tests called slit lamp examination and the glaucoma test. Slit lamp examination is undertaken to microscopically assess the delicate innards of eye like the conjunctiva, retina, circular muscles, etc. This might just throw up startling findings about some other weakness which you might be suffering from. Using a tonometer to blow a puff of air against your eye, the instrument for the glaucoma test measures your intraocular pressure.
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