Nope! A vision screening is NOT substitute for a comprehensive eye exam. Children who have never had their eyes examined by an eye doctor often are unaware that their vision is not “normal” because it’s the vision they’ve ever known.

The vision screening that a pediatrician or school nurse dies is a basic health check of vision and external eye health. If administered correctly, it can help identify some of the children who need further evaluation. A vision screening is not designed to check for vision acuity (if reading is blurry or uncomfortable), or visual skills like focusing, eye tracking, or eye alignment, nor does it look at internal eye health.

A comprehensive eye examination assesses several aspects of visual and ocular health including, but not limited to: ability to see (acuity of each eye), need for glasses or contact lens correction (refractive error), color vision assessment, depth perception, presence of ocular alignment issues, identification of amblyogenic factors, eye movement disorders, and assessment of external and internal ocular health.

Your child is working hard to learn everything they can in school, don’t let undiagnosed eye issues get in the way of their efforts!

All three working professionals are involved in your eyesight or eye care in some way. Opticians are the ones who help you with frame selection, then make and adjust your eyeglasses. Optometrists are eye doctors who will assess your vision, determine your eyeglass prescription if necessary (“Which is better, one or two?”), and will treat common eye conditions such as conjunctivitis (pink eye), scratched corneas, and amblyopia (lazy eye), to name a few. Ophthalmologists are the other sort of eye doctors who will take care of your eyes and do eye-related surgery.

If you are in need of routine, regular eye care, you can see either an optometrist or an ophthalmologist. The exam and care is the same. The benefit of seeing an optometrist is a shorter wait time between requesting and obtaining an appointment, a more personal experience with the eye doctor, and likely less time between the time you arrive at the office and the time you leave. If you see an optometrist and are flagged for a condition that requires specialist care or surgery, you will be referred to an ophthalmologist.

What a great question! To be as prepared as possible, please bring:

Your health insurance card.

Your most recent pair of glasses.

Your contact lenses (if you wear contacts), and ideally the box they came in.

If you have records from your previous eye doctor, please bring them so we can offer you the best uninterrupted care.

Also, if you’re interested in a prescription for task-specific glasses, we recommend you bring related implements/instruments/task materials if possible. For example, if you’re an orchestra musician, a stand and sheet music would be helpful. If you’re a jeweler, tools and something you’re working on can help determine the best prescription for the job. And we get to see the awesome things our patients do!

It’s easy to overlook, but contact lenses are actually medical devices in direct and daily contact with an organ (your eyes!).

With your safety in mind, contact lenses regulated by the FDA and need to be prescribed by eye doctors. Wearing contact lens puts your eyes at higher risk for infections and corneal ulcers, which can cause permanent damage in the most serious of cases. The general recommendation is that you see your eye doctor annually to ensure your eyes are still healthy enough to safely wear contact lenses.

Your eye doctor dilates your pupils so they can see instead and check on the internal health of your eye. The eye may be the window to the soul, but in its undilated state the pupil only offers a tiny glimpse of the inside of your eye!

Please note that according to the AOA, the gold standard is still dilation with eye drops, although undilated fundus photography is often used in place of dilation for general safety and convenience. The AOA recommends checking the inside of your eye (routine dilated fundus exam) every other year for adults ages 18-39, every year for adults over 65, and at the doctor’s discretion for all other ages.

In short: since your eyes are in your body, certain medications can impact your vision and so knowing about them is part of how we offer you the best care possible. Examples of ways medications can impact your vision include: the “blurry vision” side effect, other medications can affect your intraocular pressure, and some can alter your color perception.

Well first, to get to know you a bit! We look forward to being your eye care providers for many years and what’s important to you is important to us. Second, your eye exam is about figuring out the best possible prescription for you to be able to see while doing the things that matter most to you. Different occupations and hobbies involve different working distances (the distance from your eyes to the task you are doing) and will impact your prescribed prescription in different ways. Third, if we know what you’ll be doing while wearing your glasses we can make better recommendations for styles, lenses, and other features to consider.

Thank you for trusting us with your eye care! We take your anxiety seriously and we’ll do what we can to make you feel comfortable and ensure you receive high-quality care. When you schedule your exam please tell us (or include a note in the online form) that you’re anxious about the experience, and a member of our team will reach out to you to determine the best approach for your exam.

Well, contact lens manufacturer Bausch & Lomb has teamed up with Terracycle in an effort to recycle their daily disposable contact lenses, and this program will actually accept contact lenses and blister packs from all other brands. Separate from that program, while contact lenses themselves usually cannot be recycled, nor can the metal foil that covers the contact lens blisters, but many plastic contact lens blisters are made of #5 plastic, which can be recycled at Gimme 5 drop off locations.

A full eye exam has several parts. First, we check how well you can see far away and reading distance. Second, we check how well your eyes move, how well your pupils react, how your eyes are aligned, and several other assessments. Next we evaluate the health of the front of your eyes, and then finally the health of the inside of your eyes using either a fundus photograph or dilation.

All of these parts come together in a conversation between you and your eye doctor about the exam findings, and our recommendations for your eye health and needs. Sometimes, specific findings require further or additional testing and we’ll answer any questions you might have.