Some patients may be more than a little concerned when I tell them they have astigmatism. A recent, informative article on Medical News Today answers the question as to what astigmatism actually is, and provides more detail than any patient would care to know about the condition. Here’s a quick tidbit that gets to the meat of the question:

Astigmatism is an eye condition with blurred vision as its main symptom. The front surface of the eye (cornea) of a person with astigmatism is not curved properly – the curve is irregular – usually one half is flatter than the other – sometimes one area is steeper than it should be.

When light rays enter the eye they do not focus correctly on the retina, resulting in a blurred image. Astigmatism may also be caused by an irregularly shaped lens, which is located behind the cornea.

I’ve found the easiest way to explain it to my patients is to tell them that, with astigmatism, the eye (or its front surface) is not perfectly round in shape — it may be squished in one direction or the other, preventing light from focusing at a single point in the back of the eye; instead, light focuses at mutiple points (or a line), causing blur. Glasses allow us to correct that by providing different prescription powers in the different meridians of the lens. I often explain to patients that astigmatism is so common that I’m a little surprised when I run into a patient that doesn’t have any. Read the article for more detail on the subject.

Article: What Is Astigmatism? What Causes Astigmatism?

Born and raised in beautiful, southern California, I received my bachelors of science in Psychobiology at the University of California, Los Angeles, in 2004. From there, I went on to study optometry at the University of California, Berkeley — class of 2009. I am fully licensed to practice optometry in the state of California, and am TLG certified (Therapeutic Pharmaceutical Agents, Lacrimal Irrigation & Glaucoma). I am currently practicing as a staff optometrist at Clear View Optometry, in Rancho Cucamonga, 5-6 days a week.

During my time off, I like to read, blog, read other blogs — stuff mostly related to optometry, technology, and “getting things done” — and just hanging out with family and friends.

I can be reached at ehaab.zubi.od@drzubi.com. A copy of my curriculum vitae is available here.

- Ehaab Zubi, OD

Photo: http://www.flickr.com/photos/houseofsims/ / CC BY 2.0

An eye exam can be a pretty traumatic experience for some people. For others, it may just be frustrating. Why exactly are we poking and prodding at your eyes so much, when all you wanted was a pair of glasses? I think if we can clarify exactly what goes on at the eye doctor’s office, it can all be a little less scary, and a lot less exasperating. When you see your optometrist for an eye exam, the doctor will evaulate your visual system in four general areas.
These are your…

1. refractive error: what sort of glasses or contacts prescription will have you potentially seeing your best? Patients sometimes get a little anxious during this part of the exam, worried that if they make one mistake in choosing which one is better — one? …or two? — then they will have a bad prescription and it will ruin their eyes for life. This simply is not true. From our very first classes in optometry school, we as optometrists are trained in different methods to get to the right prescription even if you couldn’t tell us which one is better. A key part of those methods is to check, and double check, your responses. So don’t worry if you’re not 100% sure which one is better every once in a while. Or if they look the same to you — just tell us that; because that just means we’re getting closer to getting you the right prescription;
2. binocular vision — how well do your eyes work together as a team? There is a particular direction that each eye would like to point at when it’s resting. In order to clearly see an object, however,  your eyes have to overcome that resting position and point at the object instead — otherwise, you may see two images of that object. How well your eyes can do this together is what’s referred to as binocular vision. In some cases, where a person occasionally gets double vision, there are eye exercises and special prism lenses that can help him or her see single again. In other cases of double vision, there may be something more serious preventing the eyes from working together, requiring futher medical evaluation and treatment;
3. ocular health — are there any subtle (or not so subtle) signs in your eyes of disease that could potentially affect your vision, or even your general health? This is the reason we like to put those dilating eye drops in your eyes that make your pupils so large and pretty. The dilation allow us to get a good look inside your eyes and make sure everything is healthy. This is also the reason some doctors may blow a puff of air into your eyes. That puff lets us measure the pressure in your eyes. Many eye diseases can develop gradually and so quietly, that you won’t notice any symptoms at all until they have progressed signifcantly. Fortunately, for many of these conditions, an optometrist can see their signs and diagnose them early enough to recommend treatments. There are also a number of systemic conditions, such as hypertension and diabetes, that show specific signs within the eye to help us diagnose and make recommendations on their treatment. And finally;
4. visual perception — is the picture of the visual world getting back to your brain properly, and is it being interpreted correctly? Sometimes, even when the eye itself is in perfect health, and there’s no need for a new glasses prescription, you may still have trouble seeing things the way everyone else does — and that’s not meant to be metaphorical. A simple and most often benign example is color blindness (or color deficiency).  The inability to differentiate certain colors in the same way that everyone else does can be of little consequence if it’s congenital, but it can be very serious if it’s acquired.

An eye doctor needs to evaluate each of these four areas in order to be certain that there really isn’t anything wrong with your eyes or your vision. As I said, a lot of things can go wrong without you noticing any symptoms until it’s too late. This is why it’s important for you to get a regular eye exam — at least once every two years, and even more frequently if you have any eye conditions or are particularly near-sighted. Hopefully now all the tests we do are a little less mysterious; and perhaps going through all the different tests as a patient will be a little less frustrating.