A local optometrist is an eye doctor who provides vision testing and vision care. A local optometrist is different from an ophthalmologist, who may perform surgery and medical procedures. The goal of a local optometrist is to promote optimal eye health throughout a patient’s life, from fitting glasses in early childhood to glaucoma testing in later years. If you have diabetes, seeing a local optometrist regularly is very important, as they can be the first person to detect diseases such as diabetic retinopathy. Diabetic retinopathy is caused by damage to blood vessels in your retinal tissues.

This condition can be a result of poor blood sugar management. Your local optometrist can work with your local endocrinologist to help you manage your diabetes.  A slit lamp is a microsope and the optometrist uses it to check the health of the eye, the anterior segment of the eye.

That's going to include your lashes and your lids, your cornea, and we can check for early signs of cataracts. There are attachments that allow us to check the pressure of your eye to make sure you don't have glaucoma, and we can also look with an attachment into the retina.It's a painless procedure, and it generally takes about two or three minutes to do, and most patients are going to have it done on every single visit they have.

Well the phoropter is the instrument that the optometrist uses on every patient every single day. It contains all the lenses that are used to calculate what someones prescription might be. This lens we use to control the nearsightedness and farsightedness that might be in the prescription. This auxiliary dial is used to look for the astigmatism that might be in the prescription. And if we check for the coordination of the eyes and the muscle balances, and it will generally take about 10 minutes to do.

There are two main kinds of contacts: there are rigid gas permeable lenses and there are soft lenses.
Both are made of plastic and both are inserted into the eye. The vast majority of patients these days wear soft lenses and the soft lenses are mostly disposables these days. Disposables come as one-day lenses where you throw them out every day. They'll be available as two-week lenses, where you throw them out every two weeks, and they also come as monthly lenses.

They can correct for astigmatism, they come in a bifocal format, and most patients are suitable as candidates so long as their eyes are healthy and children should not be precluded, because of all the sports and activities they are but they must be mature enough to be able to look after the lens. Our corneal topographer is used to map the surface of the eye and with the mapping we know the exact contour of the eye and therefore we know what contour of lens to use for them.