Eyelids feel heavy and your eyes strained no surprise there with so many people working from home and the kids doing the virtual school. It does have an impact on eyesight joining me right now. Slow care, optometrist, dr katie, look good morning doctor thanks.
So much for joining us good morning, thank you for having me. Yes, since you’ve been back to work after the quarantine earlier this year. How much have you seen your business increase quite a lot with how much we are all using our computers for both school and for work, and what i’m hearing from my patients is certainly an increase in blurred vision, whether it’s coming and going or constant blurred vision.
Also dry eye and irritated and tired eyes is very common to hear these days. How many of your patients are children? You know i don’t see too many children just because we have a pediatrics group here, but i see some and both adults and children can be impacted by this.
So let’s talk about the adults. Are we doing any permanent damage to our eyes by sharing so much screen time with them right great question, and this is a real and valid concern. However, i do want to ease some fears today that, as far as the best science, we have on this there’s no true evidence that any form of light exposure coming from normal computers is causing lasting damage or blindness.
Yeah no increase in nearsightedness. That type of thing. So what what you do want to tell everybody, though i’m assuming is, is how to take some of that strain away right, and i do just want to make a quick note here.
There is some evidence that, when children are using so much near work, you know if their whole life is right. Here we actually can see an increase in nearsightedness in children. What i’m talking about is we don’t have any real evidence that we have lasting damage to the structural parts of the eye, such as the retina.
That’S been a big concern for a long time, but our best science is showing that it’s safe to continue your computer work right. Well, in our industry i mean television, we’re always looking into computers or reading prompters or looking over here, and our eyes are constantly going and what i find is if you go outside and you spend a little time outside looking at the horizon, just being with nature, It it helps.
Is that just my imagination? Absolutely that is not your imagination, there’s kind of a rule of thumb that eye doctors have been using for years even before the year 2020 and that rule is called the 2020 rule very timely and the rule is simply that about every 20 minutes of computer use.
You’Ll want to just take a 20 second break and look at least 20 feet away. I would add to that. It would be a great idea to take 20 conscious, blinks right looks silly, but you’re going to be home alone, because we tend to not blink when we’re on the computer nearly as much as we do in other activities about 50 reduction in blink rate, when we’re Using our computers, i just started doing that.
I almost knocked my contact out. You got to be careful careful there yeah somebody mentioned these blue light blocking glasses. Does that help? So i would say, there’s tons of research and articles about that.
In summary, i think that many people find some subjective benefit. You know. Is it critical to protect your eyes with them? I don’t know that we can stretch the science that far, but what i can tell you is that people seem to like them and they feel that they get some relief from their eye strain slu cares, dr katie.
Look thanks so much for joining us this morning. Thank you for having me our pleasure and if you want to get more information on your eyes and also things called computer vision syndrome and things like that, you can go to slucare.
edu health watch, it’s a long one and we’ll have that on our website. If you forget it, which you probably will, because your eyes are tired of looking at the screen right, okay, but we’ll have it on our website.
Treating Blurry Vision & Dry Eyes from Staring at Screens – SLUCare Health Watch
Source Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NWyyQvXzAi0