4 Reasons You Should Get Your Eyes Checked Regularly

When you’re running through life, taking care of your kids, driving them to school, running from job to job, errand to errand, the maddening pace can keep you from ever having time for yourself.

And when you do get that time for yourself, you’re resentful about giving it to something that seems almost unnecessary if you’re not noticing any immediate issues, that is getting an eye check-up. 

But just because it’s hard doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do it. You must get your eyes checked regularly. Read on, and we’ll let you know exactly why. 

1. Eye exams help your children

But first, let’s talk about your kids. You want them to succeed, right? And you would do anything that could help them do better.

So why leave out eye appointments from this brew of success? Did you know that four-fifths of what children are expected to pick up in and around the classroom where they spend most of their days requires some degree of good vision?

This stat might need to be fixed to be even higher today than it was in the past, owing to the use of screens and the constant exposure of children to these monitors.

Kids can’t tell if their world is blurry if that’s all they’ve ever known. An annual eye exam is the only true, scientifically-backed way to ensure that your child sees clearly and comfortably enough to succeed in the classroom.

It’s the only way you’ll know for sure if kids can participate in their classrooms fully and even just to enjoy the sparkling beauty of a colour-shifting tree.

2. Eye exams are comprehensive

It can be easy to think that a rudimentary vision screening, either for you or your kids, is enough to prove that their vision is working.

After all, they can read that text, or you can read that text, so what is there to worry about? You went to the DMV, and you could read everything on the chart. Hence you’re safe.

Except that’s wrong. That assumption is based on a false premise. Vision screenings will catch individuals with severe and usually pretty obvious vision problems.

However, they are limited in their scope. In reality, they are just meant to identify problems a person might have with specific visual activities, like looking at signs on the road from behind a car or seeing blackboards and whiteboards.

Suppose you want to catch other types of issues, like glaucoma, or eye cancer, or even just minor eye annoyances that could be resolved. In that case, you need the help of a trained optometrist or ophthalmologist to ensure that your vision is as strong and comfortable and clear as possible. 

3. But seriously, glaucoma

We touched on this tangentially just now, but glaucoma is a serious issue that needs to be treated and caught early. Let’s explain why.

The big thing is that glaucoma is a very sneaky disease and one that can very easily catch you off-guard if you don’t check for it regularly. The truth is there are no noticeable symptoms from early glaucoma.

That’s right. There’s no way for you to tell if you’re developing this condition until it’s already too late.

Typically those who fail to take eye exams regularly will notice that this has become a problem only after they’ve already had permanent vision loss due to the illness.

And by that time, controlling the disorder to stop it from reducing your vision even more will be very, very hard. You could completely lose vision in both your eyes and go entirely blind.

That’s why you need to check for glaucoma early. Early high eye pressure checks and tests, as well as considerations of other risk factors for glaucoma, are only possible if you have an eye doctor with which you can build up a file and history of work and check-up.

This is another reason you can’t rely on vision screenings, as it will not catch glaucoma early. And this leads us to another broader advantage to eye exams.

4. Catch other health problems

You can catch problems even outside the realm of your eyes.

Did you know that for lots of people the first time they ever hear about severe health conditions like high blood pressure, cancer, and diabetes is at an ordinary eye exam? Seems pretty out there, right.

The truth is that your eyes are the window to your body’s inner functions.

The eye doctor can evaluate and examine the condition and general health of the blood vessels in your retina, which act as a rock-solid predictor of the general condition of all the blood vessels in your body, meaning you can catch diabetes, hypertension and other things that cause changes in your blood vessels. 

The Final Word

There’s a lot of reasons to get eye exams done. You want to have a life where you can see, right? One where you can watch as your kids graduate and not one where you die early from some disease you could’ve caught? Then take eye exams, and make sure that your kids take them too.

By this point, you’ve likely been convinced that you desperately need to get your eyes checked. Like so many good things for our health, it’s easy to ignore any problems with your eyes until it’s altogether too late to catch problems in their tracks.

However, we’re not all perfect beings. We make mistakes, and sometimes the vagaries of life result in losing eye vision or eye ability in certain cases. Thankfully, you can always pursue laser eye surgery. Regardless of whether you’re coming in for a check-up or if you need more complex procedures, the professionals at Clearview Vision Institute can help you.

For more information about getting your eyes checked, call Clearview Vision Institute at 647-493-6371 or contact us here.