I was sitting in my exam room with an adult patient when I noticed that her four year old was being entertained by a video on a cell phone. Over the last few years there has been an explosion of hand held devices with video capability. It will be interesting to see the effects of viewing such detail at such a close distance over an extended period of time. I truly believe that the incidence of nearsightedness and possibly astigmatism can only increase with this.

I could only imagine with time these devices are going to act as "pacifiers" to kids even younger than the one just mentioned.

I mentioned in earlier posts about the effects of nearwork on vision, especially with young people. One of the more dramatic changes I have seen was with a ten year old boy. He was basically 20/20 last year. Over the last 12 months his vision has dropped to about 20/200. He can achieve 20/20 with glasses. Part of this may be genetic. However, the father states his son is constantly doing a lot of hand held video games. Think how close the device is to the boy's eyes and how small the text is. I am confident that among texting, video games and normal computer viewing, the changes in vision I will see among my patients will be very significant.

I recently had a teenage patient who had suffered an eye injury playing soccer. He was not wearing any eyewear protection. The ball hit him in the eye and he immediately noticed blurred vision. He visited the ophthalmologist. There was scarring in the back of the eye (retina). If the scarring were 2mm superior, the patient would have lost most of his central vision in that eye, and nothing would have been able to restore it. The sad part about this patient is that he is still hesitant in wearing protective eyewear due to vanity reasons.

I asked one of my high school patients what percentage of students text. He answered, "100%." when I started practicing almost 30 years ago the pc was coming on the scene. I saw changes of vision in my patients who were staring at screens at work all day. That hasn't changed much. When you text, the phone is a lot closer. It will be interesting to see if this added amount of close-up viewing will affect one's distant vision.

I had a patient whom I hadn't seen for over 10 years. Upon his eye examination, he commented to me that because we observed possible changes in the retina due to hypertension, I had referred him to his primary care physician. Indeed there was hypertension. His physician also ordered for him at that time a psa and subsequently found out the patient had prostate cancer. His doctor stated that if he would have gone six months longer, he may not have survived.

I had a patient come in this morning for an eye examination. He had lasik eye surgery to correct his distant vision. He was capable of clear vision at distance and needed reading glasses for up close. One of his main complaints was that he could not read the greens when he was putting while wearing his sunglasses. So he did not use them playing golf. The problem is that his lenses were polarized. Normally polarization helps with the sun particularly when you're on the water. However, some golfers do have problems with polarized lenses, particularly around the greens. The second thing about his sunglasses was that they were made with glass lenses. I had a patient who was struck around the eye with a golf ball while playing. Fortunately, he was wearing lenses made of polycarbonate. The lenses did not shatter. I feel that glasss lenses possilbly would have shattered and done injury to the eyes. Also, by not wearing sunglases while golfing over a long period of time, the patient was exposing himself to increase risks of cataracts and macular degeneration.

I was hearing that the increase in texting has led to individuals developing carpal tunnel syndrome. In fact there are young individuals who text 100 times, per day. Viewing a screen that close for that duration could very well affect one's vision. This is especially true in that many of the prolific texters are young. For information regarding extreme close up work over a period of time, go to our website at www.wehelpuc.com.