Eye strain is a fairly common experience to have while using computers, driving, or doing another activity that puts stress on your eyes. However, if you're experiencing eye strain frequently, you should see your ophthalmologist right away for a checkup. In addition to helping to reduce your eye strain, they can also determine if there's a more serious cause to your eye problems.
Common Causes
If your eyes are experiencing strain, fatigue, or blurriness after using the computer or driving, it's possible that your glasses may be causing the problem. While glasses are great for helping you to see things up close and far away, the strong light that is emitted by your computer monitor can reflect off of your lenses, creating a glare. This same type of glare is also possible when you're driving, either from exposure to sunlight or other cars' headlights.
If your glasses are the problem, your ophthalmologist can set you up with a prescription for lenses with a glare-resistant coating. In addition, if you haven't gotten a new prescription recently, your eyes may be experiencing strain because the prescription on your glasses is no longer appropriate for your eyes.
Moderate, Less-Common Causes
While a great deal of eye strain can be blamed on reflected light, it's not always to blame. Believe it or not, having allergies may actually increase your risk of eye strain.
Allergies can affect your eyes by making them itchy, inflamed, and even reduce or increase the amount of tears your eyes naturally produce, which can make your vision blurry or out of focus. In addition, if you're frequently rubbing your eyes because they itch, that may worsen the blurriness. If you think that allergies aren't the culprit because you don't normally suffer from allergies, keep in mind that 2015 is the worst year for pollen yet. Even people with little to no allergic symptoms are experiencing higher allergy symptoms due to the extreme levels of pollen.
An ophthalmologist can prescribe a medication to you to help with the allergy symptoms, which may improve your levels of eye strain.
Extreme Causes
It's also a good idea to see an ophthalmologist to make sure that your eye strain isn't being caused by something else. While it's reasonable to believe that if your vision is blurry that eye strain is to blame, a wide variety of diseases can cause blurry vision. Diabetes, cataracts, eye infections, and many other ailments can cause blurry vision and need immediate treatment in order to reverse the symptoms and prevent serious, permanent damage.
If your eye strain only happens once in a while, you probably have nothing to worry about. However, if you're developing a pattern of eye strain symptoms, or regularly experience eye strain, an ophthalmologist can not only treat the problem, but give you peace of mind.
To learn more, visit a website like http://arizonaeyes.net.
Share24 August 2015
Vision problems can be sneaky. When my daughter started having trouble in school, nobody thought that the problem could be with her vision. She wasn't complaining about not being able to see ; she was acting out instead. Plus, she could read the eye chart. It took a lot of trial and error to realize that while she could see, her eyes weren't working together correctly. She needed vision therapy to get herself back on track. I started this blog to share information with other concerned parents about how vision affects learning. Don't let a vision problem sneak by you and impact your child's education.
