Wesley Chew, OD - The Importance of An Annual Eye Exam

Transcript

So, many patients come to our office asking whether their vision screening is equivalent to a comprehensive eye exam, and unfortunately the answer is that they are not equivalent. So, it's important to come in to us to get your comprehensive eye examination. You may have heard of some diseases such as glaucoma, cataracts, macular degeneration, and we certainly check for all those diseases.

But, there's also other diseases, many other diseases, that you haven't heard of that can affect the eyes. Even those with diabetes, or high blood pressure, they can have problems in their eyes as well. The diabetes and high blood pressure can cause small bleeds on the retinal blood vessels inside the eye, and sometimes the bleeding is so small that, you know, it's not affecting vision.

These patients can come in to our office, sit in our exam chair, read a 20/20 row out of each eye, and the minute we look in their eye we see a lot of bleeding, or big problems in the eyes that the patient had no idea that they had. We get in contact with their primary care doctors and make sure that they're getting the right help medication-wise, diet, and exercise-wise to make sure that this bleeding can be resolved, or we can initiate treatment ourselves.

But there's also many other diseases that we're looking for including, you know, including medication side effects such as arthritis medications, antihistamines, migraine medications. A lot of these medications have side effects that can affect the eyes and it's important that you come in for your routine comprehensive eye examination.

Bring your medication list, bring your symptoms, let us know, some of these unrelated symptoms that you might have, they might actually be something that we can help with. So, schedule your comprehensive eye exam today with us and bring all your concerns and we'll help you out and make sure everything is looking good.