Many people choose to get contact lenses instead of eyeglasses for vision correction. You can get contacts for cosmetic purposes or for purely medical reasons, but the evaluations in either scenario are essential. The evaluation for contact lens prescriptions is a three-step process where your optometrist will see if your eyes can tolerate the lens, whether you can comply with the safety precautions and then a follow-up.
It pays to know what you’re signing up for when you’re thinking of getting an eye exam to see if you still want them, considering the care these require and whether you can even use lenses. This blog is going to walk you through the process of a contact lens exam.
Step 1: Medical Evaluations
Contact lenses are basically foreign objects that rest on your eyes. This has the potential to irritate the eye and might exacerbate any pre-existing conditions you might have. During the medical evaluation, your doctor will check if your ocular conditions or the structure of your eye can allow a contact lens to be used. Common conditions that your doctor will check for are papillae, allergies to lenses and the presence of blood vessels on the surface of the eye, signaling corneal lack of oxygen or hypoxia.
Step 2: Prescribing Diagnostic Lenses
Many times complications from contact lenses come from patient’s negligence. People tend to fall asleep with their lenses, forget the hygiene habits that come with wearing contacts or just generally don’t take care of the lens. Unfortunately, contact lenses complications remain fairly common, they range from irritation to infections that can lead to permanent vision loss.
Once your optometrist has given you the thumbs-up for a contact lens, they will try a diagnostic lens to check how you see, how you feel and assess the lens itself onto the eye. You get to keep the lens for a week at most and then you come back to tell them if you’ve had any problems. If you don’t have any problems, then you will move on to the final step.
Step 3: Finalizing the Evaluation
Once the diagnostic period has passed, your doctor will take another look at your eye to see if you’re comfortable with the lens and if it is irritated the eye in any way. They will do a further follow-up to see whether you fully understand how to take care of the lens well.
Once they’re satisfied, they will give you a prescription for the lens. If at any point during this process you are uncomfortable or dissatisfied with the lens, you will go through the process with new lenses or your doctor will not prescribe you contacts at all.
It is not uncommon to go through a few different diagnostic lenses until the best one is found for a particular patient.
Dr. Gilberg and Associates offer expert eye-treatment services in North Miami. Our services include contact lens examinations, digital eye tests and emergency eye care for numerous eye-related conditions. Get in touch with us today for more information on our services.