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Written by : Mamie Vondoloski |
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eye exercises will improve your vision can i just do this please yes contact lenses can get lost behind your eye uh no if you sneeze with your eyes open they'll pop out i i don't know where to start with this um myth hi my name is dr ronnie banik i'm a board certified ophthalmologist and neuro-ophthalmologist and i'm dr jennifer sci practicing optometrist in new york city i specialize in medical and aesthetic eye care and today we will be debunking myths about vision 2020 means you have perfect vision ah that's a good one a lot of people think 2020 means perfect vision but there is so much to vision beyond just reading the eye chart and reading down to 2020. and when we say 2020 vision it means that this chart is at 20 feet away from the patient and they can read all the way down to this line right here there are other lines below that some people can actually read even better than 2020 but there are so many other components of vision for example there's color vision there's peripheral vision there's contrast and we also check for near point vision which has to do with reading up close and technically you could have 20 20 vision but have a condition such as glaucoma which can cause peripheral vision loss which means you have perfect 20 20 vision in the center but you might have side vision loss blue light will damage my eyes oh my gosh i don't know what to think about that back in 2018 there was a study that came out that the media picked up on and they said oh blue light is going to damage your retina it's going to cause permanent blindness what the researchers did in the study was they took cells they put them in a petri dish and they exposed those cells to high high levels of blue light and they found out that those cells died the truth is that the cells that they put in that petri dish were not even eye cells they were cervical cancer cells so our retina cells have pigments that protect us against blue light they're called lutein and zeaxanthin they're like our natural blue blockers and they protect our eyes against blue light so there is no proof that blue light damages your eyes and if it were really true we would actually have a pandemic of blindness because all of us are on devices all the time children adults and it's just not true we do know that it affects our sleep and it does cause insomnia because it changes our circadian rhythm so when you wear like coating on your glasses it does help with light sensitivity and glare and just generally making you feel more comfortable when you're doing work so there is no downside to it the tint does make a difference because if you put on the lighter tint blue blockers and if you look at your screen if you can still see the color blue it means that that blue blocker is not blocking out 100 of the blue light maybe it's blocking out a certain lower percentage maybe 30 to 40 percent versus if you put on these these are the super duper blue blockers if you look at a screen with these on you don't see any blue whatsoever so for example if i'm having trouble sleeping and i need to use my computer at night i'll wear these at night time two hours before bed so it doesn't really interfere with my sleep the other thing that can happen when you're on a screen for a long time is probably you're not blinking enough so you're probably also getting dry eye and that's probably also contributing to the eye strain you will lose your vision as you age i hear this all the time for my patients i have patients who are older your 60s 70s 80s even 90 year old patients who still have 20 20 vision sometimes the dinner menu gets harder to read at the restaurant and i tell them that's absolutely normal that's not losing your vision it's just that our vision starts to change in the other direction sometimes so when we're referring to presbyopia that is the gradual change when our eyes are not able to accommodate or focus on near objects as well and we tend to hold things further back so why does this happen well it's because inside the eye we have a lens now normally the lens is very flexible and it can change shape sometimes it can get thicker or thinner in the middle that allows us to focus at different distances as we get older though this lens just doesn't change shape as well it becomes more stiff and when it becomes more stiff that is called loss of accommodation or presbyopia and again that usually happens to most people sometime in their 40s or 50s we also notice that over time our eyes start to improve as we get older it has to do with the fact that as we grow our eyes elongate and that can lead to myopia or near-sightedness and over time just like our body can shrink our eyes can shrink shorter and that can lead our prescription to go the opposite way there's lots that can go wrong but as long as you see your eye doctor regularly you get checked for it you get it taken care of you can still maintain good 20 20 vision into your golden years lasik means no glasses forever i wish that were true but there is no guarantee with any kind of procedure that your vision will be what you hope it to be lasik is just resetting your prescription back to zero so lasik can provide sharp clear vision but that doesn't mean it can prevent myopia regression or the need for reading glasses sometimes there can be regression which means that after six months or a year the cornea may start to change back into its natural shape for the most part it is very very safe but just make sure you talk to your surgeon about it first to make sure that you're a good candidate because not everyone is a good candidate okay color blindness equals seeing in black and white this is an interesting one a lot of people think that if you have color blindness that's all you're going to see is like monochrome but it's not true most people who have color blindness or what we call color deficiency have issues with seeing different shades of reds and greens and sometimes also oranges and yellows it's not that they can't see those colors they just see those colors differently so we have cells in our retinas called photoreceptors the rods are responsible for light and dark vision the cones are responsible for color visions we have red cones green cones and blue cones and these cones are all tuned into certain wavelengths so in people who are color blind it's not that they don't have those cones it's just that those cones are set to a different wavelength so instead of seeing a red is bright red they may see it kind of as a muted color or maybe as like an orange or yellow actually it's pretty common in the population to have color blindness i think it's like eight percent of the population if you go to the eye doctor they can do a color test on you it shows you numbers within patterns of color and it tests the intensity or density of how much colorblindness there is over a spectrum but it really doesn't impact someone's life at all people with colorblindness function completely normally and there is no long-term issue with that eye exercises will improve your vision what do you think about that this is a myth can i just do this please yes so there is ju
Thanks for your comment Tawnya Dungey, have a nice day.
- Mamie Vondoloski, Staff Member
if you are 25 or older and you are spending a lot of time looking at things up close and you are not allowing your vision to relax you may or may not have migraine headaches you may or may not have headaches you might have sleep problems because they're not viewing sunlight early in the day challenges with your eyesight getting worse as you age or even in young people there's an epidemic of myopia if your behavior is around Vision aren't right you cannot expect to have good healthy eyesight for a long time meaning throughout your lifespan and if your vision is already poor many of these things that I'm talking about today perhaps all of them will improve your vision to some degree and if your vision is starting to go then doing these behaviors is likely to really enhance the quality of the vision that you will build and maintain over time it's actually not going to solve the problem just to look up from your computer screen you need to go to a window you need to look out at a distance ideally you would even open the window because those windows actually filter out a lot of the blue light that you want during the daytime a lot of the sunlight it's actually 50 times less gets through you want to get out onto a balcony you want to relax your eyes and look out at the Horizon you want to go into what's called panoramic vision and let your vision expand you want this lens mechanism to be very elastic you don't want it to get stuck in that configuration of looking at things up close accommodation is a wonderful feature of your visual system but you don't want to push that too hard you want to view the Horizon you want to get outside not just to lighten the load on your mind or to think about other things but to maintain the health of your visual system in other words you want to exercise these muscles and that involves both the lens moving and getting kind of thicker and relaxing that lens and the relaxation of the lens is actually one of the best things you can do for the musculature of the inner eye you might be surprised but for every 30 minutes of focused work you probably want to look up every once in a while and just try and relax your face and eye muscles including your jaw muscles because all these things are closely linked in the brain stem and allow your eyes to go into called panoramic Vision where you're just not really focusing on anything and then refocus on your work at least every 90 minutes of looking at things up close or even if you're looking at a screen you know television screen or or you're watching a movie you ideally would have at least 20 probably more like 30 minutes of being outside ideally but if you can't be outside of non-up close Vision you might say that's impossible how am I supposed to do that you know I'm in an office or I'm in a building get to a window get outside if you can do it safely get onto a balcony and just let your eyes relax you can actually take a few minutes each day or maybe if you don't do it each day you could every third day or so and actually just visually track a ball sometimes it's moving in kind of an infinity symbol sometimes it's more of a Sawtooth sometimes it's changing speed sometimes the uh the cue that you're following the little Target is um dilating and Contracting this is going to keep the extraocular muscles conditioned and strong and allow you to to have a healthy smooth Pursuit system remember the brain follows the eye it follows the movements of the eye it has to deal with that and the neural circuits within the brain have to cope with changes in smooth Pursuits and so while I prefer that people get out into the real world and experience smooth Pursuit tracking of visual objects you know it was a good reason to go to a hockey game or you know and try and keep your eye on the puck which I can never seem to do move so fast or I guess this is a good reason to watch live sports if that's your thing or watch a tennis match like a cat like a kitten watching the ball go back and forth I would say five to ten minutes three times a week will be great if you care about your vision you can train your vision in this way the other one is to train accommodation there are a lot of videos out there I want to be clear on the internet most of those are geared toward improving the extraocular eye muscles so spending a few minutes you might even just do this for two minutes of looking at something up close that's going to activate these accommodation mechanisms and then moving it at arm's length and focusing on it for 5-10 seconds maybe more maybe 15 or 20 seconds then slowly moving it into a location and then out this is actually a lot like the visual training that's done post concussion to try and Repair actually repair some of the balance and motor and visual and cognitive aspects of the brain spend two to three minutes doing smooth Pursuit there's some programs on YouTube um you can just look up smooth Pursuit stimulus you could do this with a pen if you wanted you could do this uh someone else could hold a wand and you could do that if you've got someone they can do that for you prac practice accommodation for a few minutes maybe every other day just bringing something in close you'll feel the strain of your eyes doing that I can feel it right now move it out you'll feel a relaxation Point move it past that relaxation point where you will have to do what's called a virgin side movement to maintain focus on that location as it moves out bring it back in it's worth doing it's really worth preserving your vision and again if you're a young person this is great because then you can actually build an extra strong visual system using all the tools that we're describing
Thanks em0b4byC your participation is very much appreciated
- Mamie Vondoloski
About the author
I've studied computational fluid dynamics at College of Central Florida in Ocala and I am an expert in agricultural policy. I usually feel happy. My previous job was computer programmer I held this position for 15 years, I love talking about darts and bagpipes. Huge fan of G-Eazy I practice triathlon training and collect handbags.
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