Your Eyes & Diabetes

Diabetes does affect your eyes and you should be making regular eye doctor visits when you have diabetes. Blurry vision, cataracts, glaucoma, and retinopathy are problems that can occur with high blood sugar. Diabetic eye problems usually don’t have any symptoms in the early stages. Even if you think your eyes are healthy, it is important to do regular dilated eye exams.

Wash Your Hands!

While Covid-19 continues to evolve, wash your hands frequently. Covid-19 can enter the body through your eyes, if someone sneezes or coughs virus particles are in the air. It’s also possible to touch a surface, such as a door handle, that is contaminated with the virus and then touching your eye may become infected. Touching a contaminated surface and then touching your eye would be the worst because you could be exposed to the virus and a potential eye infection.

Color Blindness

There are an estimated 300 million people in the world with color vision deficiency. A fairly common condition in which you don’t see colors the traditional way. When cones (a type of nerve cell in your retina) aren’t working correctly. In order to perceive color, cones process light and images as they enter your eye and send signals to your brain. 

Dangers of Rubbing Your Eyes

We all rub our eyes thinking it’s a harmless thing to do. Most of us do it on a daily basis, whether it’s hay fever or a common cold or even just feeling tired and groggy. It stimulates tears to flow, lubricating dry eyes and removing dust and other irritants. When you press down on your eyeball it can stimulate the vagus nerve, that slows down your heart rate, relieving stress which can also be therapeutic. Although, rubbing your eyes too hard or too often can cause damage in many ways. It may cause tiny blood vessels to break, resulting in bloodshot eyes or dark undereye circles. Germs are also easily transferred from our hands, which can cause conjunctivitis infection. 

Animal Eye Knowledge

Human eyes are already interesting as is. Did you know that a shark’s cornea has been used in human eye surgery, as it is the most similar to the human cornea. Rectangular pupils? Never seen or heard of that one, but goats do have rectangular pupils to give them a wide field of vision. 

Us humans think we can see so many colors, but human eyes are not the most highly evolved. The mantis shrimp has four times as many color receptors as the human eye and some can see ultraviolet light too.

Ultraviolet Awareness Month

It is a golden time to highlight Ultraviolet Awareness Month since summer is right around the corner. Every human being of any skin pigmentation and age is susceptible to UV damage. Make sure to wear the proper UV blocking sunglasses and wide brim hat to protect yourself from the damaging UV rays. People with light-colored eyes (blue, green & hazel) need to make sure that they prioritize covering up with a hat and UV-blocking glasses. Some studies show that UV exposure and light irises may increase the risk of rare eye cancers such as melanoma of the iris or uveal melanoma. 

Alarms Off & Weekend Mode On!

Happy Friday!

It’s finally the weekend where many of us will be getting in some extra hours of sleep. Some of us have really busy lives with not enough sleep, but we need to make sure to at least have 5 hours of sleep every night for our eyes to replenish for a new day. Limiting the blue light around bedtime is important for anyone who has a hard time falling asleep in the smartphone era and avoiding screens an hour before bedtime could possibly help you fall asleep faster. Also making use of the blue light filters on our devices could significantly help as well. 

Don’t forget to dim the blue lights before bed & have a great weekend!

Athletes, Don’t Forget to Protect Your Eyes!

Allergies Are Springing Up

Spring’s warm weather finally makes it the perfect time to have fun outside. However, common eye conditions that occur in the spring season may prevent you from enjoying the sun and the great outdoors.