Anyone who doesn’t have color blindness might expect it to work like black-and-white photography. It’s actually more complex than that. There are different types of color blindness, and whether or not you have it is almost always dictated by your genes. The Genetics Of Color Blindness Color blindness is largely determined by a recessive gene on the X chromosome. This means …
Protecting Your Eyes From Snow Blindness
Protecting Your Eyes from Snow Blindness If this sounds familiar to you, you may have been exposed to high levels of UV rays from light reflections while boating, hiking at high elevation, or participating in snow sports like skiing and snowboarding. This condition, formally called photokeratitis, is particularly common in winter, and you might have heard of it by the name “snow …
A Quick Guide To Glasses Care
How to Clean Your Glasses There are times when it’s tempting to just reach for the hem of your shirt, but if you want those lenses to last as long as they should, it’s important to clean them the right way. That’s why we’ve put together a list of glasses cleaning dos and don’ts for you to use! How NOT …
Contact Lenses: More Than Meets The Eye
The Evolution of Contact Lenses It’s true that they’ve only become popular in recent decades, but you might be surprised to learn that Leonardo da Vinci first sketched the concept of contact lenses way back in 1508! His version involved submerging one’s head in a glass bowl of water, so it definitely needed work, but how did we get from there to …
Presbyopia And Progressive Lenses
Presbyopia, or farsightedness caused by reduced elasticity of the eye’s lens, affects nearly everyone older than 65. About 42 percent of Americans who are in their prime are nearsighted. For them, a simple pair of reading glasses can’t solve the problem of presbyopia, and that’s where bifocals, trifocals, and progressive lenses come in. Options For Correcting Presbyopia Bifocals are simply glasses with lenses …
Glaucoma: The Basics
Glaucoma Treatment in Austin, TX When the optic nerve is damaged, our vision suffers. A group of conditions that threaten the optic nerve is glaucoma. In the United States, glaucoma is the second most common cause of vision loss and blindness, affecting three million people. Because January is National Glaucoma Awareness Month, we wanted to give our patients a basic …
Healthy Foods For Healthy Eyes
How Healthy Foods Can Protect Your Eyes What we choose to eat is one of the most important variables to our health. It affects our weight, our energy levels, our risk of many types of disease—the list goes on and on. Today, the item on that list we’re most interested in is how diet affects eye health. Important Building Blocks …
How Does Our Night Vision Compare?
Night Vision: Humans vs. Animals Our ability to see the world around us in clear, precise images is frankly incredible. But since we are a diurnal (awake during the daytime) species, our night vision is nowhere near as powerful as that of many animals. Human Vision Tag-Team: Rods and Cones Two of the most important types of cells involved in …
The Value Of Back-To-School Eye Exams
With school starting up again soon, now is a great time to start thinking about scheduling an eye appointment for your child. Classroom Vision Problems Are Varied Experts estimate that 10 percent of preschoolers have a vision problem significant enough to impact learning, and being nearsighted or farsighted aren’t the only problems you can have with your vision. Colorblindness is also common, …
20/20 In Hindsight: The Snellen Eye Chart
Origin of the Eye Chart at the Doctor’s Office The famous eye chart is actually called the Snellen Chart. It was named for the 19th-century Dutch ophthalmologist who first developed it. Glasses Before Eye Charts Glasses were invented in Italy around 1286, though they were fairly crude. It wasn’t until two centuries later that concave and convex lenses were being crafted …
