Our sense of sight is one important aspect of our body that we need to take care of. And we are really lucky to be born with perfect vision, unlike others who may be born with certain kinds of eye issues or diseases. This is why our parents or elders always reminds us to take good care of our health especially our eyes.
During our childhood, we were always told to eat healthy foods and were reprimanded whenever we watched television too much. And due to the accessibility of smartphones and gadgets these days, we should be wary of our children’s eye health. They should be restricted with the amount of time spent on gadgets so that their eyes won’t be strained early.
You can keep your eyes healthy by following some of the steps recommended by eye specialists:
Eat a healthy and balanced diet. One should start eating fruits and vegetables to maintain good eyesight. Foods rich in Vitamin A or green leafy vegetables are mostly suggested.
Keep check of your weight. You need to keep track of your weight because obesity or being overweight can lead to diabetes. Having diabetes will likely enhance the risk of developing glaucoma, an eye disease that may cause total blindness when not treated or detected earlier.
Have some regular exercise. Having a regular exercise habit helps in preventing diseases which can possibly lead to eyesight problems.
Wear sunglasses when you are outside and exposed to the heat of the sun. It is known that being exposed to the sun especially when looking at it with no protective gear can raise the risk of developing cataracts and other vision problems. Make sure to protect your eyes outside by wearing sunglasses with UVA and UVB protection.
Wear protective eye gear. This is mostly needed when you are playing certain sports that have a high risk of damaging your eyes or when you are working in factories or doing home repairs.
Don’t smoke. Smoking increases the risk of developing diseases, and these include the risk of developing eye problems such as cataracts or macular degeneration.
Have a regular eye check-up. This is mostly needed if your family has a history of having eye diseases or some kind of vision problem. This is for early detection and early treatment if ever there’s a possibility of developing eye problems.
Give your eyes some rest. This is more important to people who are working behind computers all day. Make sure to follow the 20-20-20 rule which means to look away for about 20 feet every 20 seconds. You can do this after every 20 minutes of being on the screen.
These are just some of the tips that people should keep in mind to keep their eyes healthy. Since most of us rely on our eyesight for our everyday activities, it is really hard when we start to feel or suffer from some vision problems. And this does not only concern our personal lives as patients but on the lives of our loved ones as well.
It is not an easy feeling to know that a family member suffers from certain health problems, especially when it is about having vision or eye problems. Whenever we hear issues like this, we will always be concerned about what we can do to help him ease the pain or have him convince to go to a specialist to make sure that things are working out well and if there are real health issues, we want it to be faced and detected early on to avoid further complications.
The patient will be lucky if the problem is detected early so that it will also be treated immediately and not develop into total blindness. But there are eye diseases that do not give warning signs early on so it would be much better to do prevention by following the tips above. We should really take care of our eyes as much as we take care of the other parts of our body.
But we also can’t ignore the fact that accidents happen, and as much as we do not want it, there will be times when certain circumstances may cause us injuries or eye problems like car accidents or even small accidents from doing our daily activities. Until then, we just have to pray that things will get better. And if this happens to any of our family members, I guess we should just be there for him or her and offer help as much as we can. Things may not be easy, especially when the patient is admitted because of financial issues, as well as assigning or looking for a caregiver who can really watch over the patient. Having vision problems should not be taken lightly so we should make sure that the patient has someone whom he can depend on while getting treated.
“Prevention is better than cure,” so if our eyes are still giving us the best visions in our daily lives, we should be more thankful and do our best to take care of it to avoid problems and worries from our loved ones.