Just the way regular physical health check-up is crucial for maintaining optimal health, similarly eye test or eye exam is equally important for the maintenance of your eyes’ health. Eyes are not just an important sense organ, but they are an index to your physical health also. Medical experts can diagnose a health disease you might be suffering from by examining your eye health. Moreover, with the regular annual examination, you will be able to detect and diagnose any issue at its early stage and get it resolved there only, thereby avoiding the further spread of the disease or damage to the eyes.
A comprehensive eye exam includes a series of tests that are performed to check ocular health as well as eye vision. While you visit a doctor for your complete eye test, they might ask you questions related to your eye essentials, such as your eyeglasses, prescription of contact lenses and glasses, quality of contact lens solution you use, eye drops you use, any medications, medical history or allergy. Based on these questions, they will carry out further examination.
Types of Eye Test:
After getting your medical history and all other required details, the doctor will perform a series of eye tests to check your eye vision and its health. There will be two types of tests for your eyes– Vision Tests and Ocular Health Tests. Let’s know more about them.
Vision Tests:
- Visual Acuity Test: This is the first test that is performed to check the sharpness of your eyesight. You are asked to read letters from an eye chart both from near and far off distance to evaluate your visual acuity.
- Refraction Test: This test helps to determine how much myopia, hyperopia, astigmatism, and presbyopia you have. During the examination, you will be allowed to focus on an eye chart placed at a distance of 10-20 feet through an instrument known as a phoropter. The doctor will put different lenses in the instrument while you read out the eye chart to check which lens provides you the clearest vision. This will help the doctor finalize the best lens power for your eyes.
- Retinoscopy Test: In this test, you will be asked to see on the eye chart again while the doctor will shine a bright light into your eyes. By this, they will come to know if there is any distortion in the shape of the cornea or if you have a cataract. Also, by observing the way light reflects from your eyes, they will be able to prescribe the best lens power to correct your vision.
- Color Test: This test allows them to check for any color vision deficiencies and possible health problems that can affect your color vision.
- Cover Test: This test allows them to rule out the alignment of eyes at both near and far off distances to detect issues such as strabismus (eye misalignment) and amblyopia (lazy eye).
- Ocular Motility Test: This eye test is used to evaluate how capable your eyes are to follow a moving object and quickly move between two distinct objects and accurately focus on them. It helps to rule out causes for eye strain, headache, and blurry vision.
- Stereopsis Test: It is used to check your eye teaming skills for normal depth perception and ability to see 3-dimensional objects.
Ocular Health Tests:
- Slit Lamp Test: It is performed by using a binocular microscope to thoroughly examine the ocular structures for identification of any eye disease.
- Glaucoma Test: This eye test is used to measure the pressure inside your eyes. A puff of air is passed towards your eyes and based on how your eyes resist puffed air, the machine known as a tonometer calculates the intraocular pressure or IOP in your eyes. In the second part, your eyes are made numb by putting some yellow-colored eye drops, then the doctor gently touches the surface of your eye with a tonometer to get another measurement of your IOP.
- Visual Field Test: This test is performed to detect any blind spots in your peripheral vision.
f
Even if you are healthy and don’t experience any vision problems, you must get your eyes tested after every few years. However, if you wear eyeglasses or contact lenses, if you have a family history of eye disease, any chronic health condition such as diabetes or hypertension, or you take any medication that can affect eye vision, then you need to get your eye test even more frequently. Remember, ignorance or carelessness in such cases can cost you heavily in the long run. So never avoid your eye health.
