Time for Your Eye Exam?

Eye diseases are sneaky customers. They start damaging your vision permanently before they start telling you about it with symptoms. Glaucoma and macular degeneration both don’t exhibit early symptoms.

But at Central Valley Eye Medical Group, we can see them as soon as they start to show up. How? During your normal eye exam. That’s why we look at your retina in the back of your eye. That’s why we do the air puff test to check for the pressure inside your eye, which is a sign of glaucoma.

But you have to come in for your eye appointment for us to see these things. Most people are more concerned about their car’s supposed need for 3,000-mile oil changes than getting their eyes checked every couple of years. That’s a shame, considering how much we all value our eyesight.

Here’s what we test during our comprehensive eye exams at Central Valley.

These are what we will test:

• Visual acuity test— This uses an alphabet eye chart, also called the Snellen chart. You read the letters that get progressively smaller the farther down your read.
• Refraction assessment— As light rays enter the front of your eyes, they are bent as they reach the retina in the back of the eye. If the light rays aren’t focused properly, you have a refractive error. Glasses or contact lenses correct these errors. To fine tune the amount of error and correction we use a phoropter, where alternate lenses are rotated in front of your eyes to find which correction gives you the best vision.
• Eye muscle test— You simply follow an object and we watch your eye movements to check for muscle weakness, poor control, or poor coordination between eyes.
• Vision field test— This determines if you have difficulty seeing in any areas of your overall field of vision. We use an automated perimetry machine where you look at a screen with blinking lights on it. You press a button each time you see a light.
• Color vision test— To test for any color vision problems, we show you several multicolored dot-pattern tests. There are numbers and shapes within the dot patterns. If you can’t see certain colors, you won’t see the numbers/shapes in the dots.
• Slit-lamp examination— The slit lamp is a microscope that illuminates and magnifies the front of your eye. We examine your eyelids, lashes, cornea, iris, lens, and the fluid chamber in your eye.
• Retinal examination— Sometimes called funduscopy or ophthalmoscopy, this is the examination of the back of your eye, where the retina, optic disc, and various blood vessels are found. For this exam, we may dilate your eyes with eyedrops. These keep the pupil from getting smaller when a light is shown on it.
• Glaucoma screening— Glaucoma is a disease where pressure builds inside your eyeball, intraocular pressure. This pressure damages the optic nerve and your vision. For this test, we usually use a puff of air shot onto the front of the eye. This measures the pressure in the eye.

Is it time to schedule your next routine eye exam? Call us at Central Valley Eye Medical Group in Stockton or Manteca, (800) 244-9907.

Posted in: Comprehensive Eye Exams