Why Sudden Floaters or Flashes Signal a Serious Eye Problem
Seeing a speck in your vision is probably nothing, but if you suddenly see a burst of floaters and/or flashes, you may be looking at a medical emergency. Keep reading to learn why.
Start the New Year With an Eye Checkup
It’s finally 2021! If you’re looking forward to a fresh start, there’s no better way than to invest in your health. While everyone is trying to get more exercise and eat more vegetables, why not take this time to schedule your comprehensive eye exam?
Our team of expert ophthalmologists at the Retina Specialists offices — in Dallas, DeSoto, Plano, Mesquite, and Waxahachie, Texas — want to help you keep your eyes healthy and your vision crisp. Eye exams are the foundation of preventive eye care.
Why should I have an eye exam?
Many people think they can skip eye checkups if they don’t need glasses or contact lenses to see clearly. However, even if you don’t need corrective lenses, you can still develop eye diseases that can lead to vision loss when left untreated. You should have an eye exam at least every other year to screen for eye health issues and test your vision.
In fact, eye diseases like retinopathy, glaucoma, and macular degeneration don’t cause noticeable symptoms in their early stages. For some conditions, the first evident sign of a problem is vision loss. However, our team can identify eye disease before it causes vision loss, and we can provide treatments to protect your vision and eye health.
What happens during an eye exam?
We offer comprehensive dilated eye exams to assess your visual acuity (how well you see) as well as your overall eye health.
Vision testing
We use various tests to evaluate your vision. We ask you to read a sequence of letters on a Snellen eye chart. The letters decrease in size, and when the letters are too small for you to read, we can determine if you need corrective lenses. We test each of your eyes individually, as well as how well you see with both eyes. We use refraction to determine your specific prescription, if necessary.
We also test your ocular motility and depth perception, and we screen you for color blindness.
Eye disease testing
Our team also screens for signs of eye disease. We dilate your pupils with special eye drops, which allows us to see the inside of your eye in more detail. We use a slit lamp to look inside your eye and retinal scans to take pictures of your retina. This test helps us identify retinopathy, macular degeneration, and cataracts.
We also offer non-contact tonometry to test for glaucoma. You might think of this as the air-puff test. The equipment measures the pressure in your eye, a key indicator of early-stage glaucoma.
Start the new year off right. Call one of our offices to schedule an eye exam today.
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