I just went to have my eyes checked because it’s been a couple of years, and I’d like to try contacts again. So I sat in the big chair and read the little chart, one eye at a time then both together… then the whole “which is better, 1… or 2?” routine with the lens-switching. and that was it.
I remember at other eye exams in the past, there was a red/green thing where I had to say whether I saw letters better in the green or red half. And a test where I had to say when two sections of a line matched up, This exam completely skipped those bits. Is that normal?
The red and green is a test for color blindness and like other tests may not be preformed if your there for only a lens prescription. You should ask for a full eye examine that checks everything to be sure you get checked for eye diseases.
Forgot to mention, he did the puff-of-air test (for glaucoma?) and stared into my eyes with a bright light to check my retina. So that stuff was covered. But the lining-up-the-lines test, I thought was standard. For astigmatism, maybe?
My doc has an automated test for that these days, something about looking into yet another little machine which measures your focusing reactions. A similar one also automagically tests quadrant/perhiperal vision. Anything like that?
Speaking of tests done when we were kids, did anyone else have their eye doctor show them a BIG picture of a fly to see if you could see it in 3-D?
And my guy when I was growing up always said “1 or 2” for every comparison. Years later a doc said “1 or 2” and then “3 or 4”. “3 or 4”? You just blew my mind!
I got glasses when I was 9 and it was years before I figured out that the ophthalmologist didn’t know the answers to the questions. It was called an eye exam, so I figured there were “correct” answers and I was always nervous that I was getting things wrong.
What I love is when they dialate your eyes and then ask you to pick out which frames you’d like. No biggie, it’s just what you’re going to look like for the next coupla years.
Eh, I’ve always been so near-sighted that the dilation never made that much difference when I was looking at frames. No, what always pissed me off when I was a kid is they’d pull out a pair and have me put them on, and ask me what I thought about how they looked. In the big plate-glass mirrored wall behind the counter. Um, I’m legally blind without correction in my good eye, I got no lenses, and that mirror is about 15 feet away. WTF makes you morons think I can see anything but a pinkish blob?
Exactly! Now I try them on with my contacts in, but of course that doesn’t show me what they’ll look like when done – with the glasses lenses pulling the sides of my face in when people look through them. :mad:
As kids, we got to pick from the deluxe Cheap Glasses That IBM Would Pay For collection – there were some real winners but I didn’t get the full effect when trying them on “blind”.
My mom was super near sighted starting as a little kid and couldn’t even see where the screen was. She memorized the chart and “cheated” for a while before they figured it out.
The red green letter and the associated question “On which side does the letter look clearer, the red side or the green side?” is a technique of binocular balancing, known as the Humphriss.
It’s not the only technique out there, though. The one we’re encouraged to use at my school is known as “Prism dissociation,” in which different vertical prisms are placed in front of the right and left eyes and the patient compares views in each eyes. This tends to be more accurate than the Humphriss technique.
Humphriss is good if patients have a big difference in the max acuity achievable in each eye, because most other techniques involve attempting to equalize the clarity of the letters viewed in each eye, which is difficult to do if, say, your right eye can only see 20/40 and your left eye is refractable down to 20/20.
You eye doctor should do some form of binocular balancing if you’re young enough to accommodate (i.e. not presbyopic). Another method, which you might not even have realized was being used, is to rapidly cover and uncover one eye and then the other, and ask the patients if one view is clearer than the other (that is, ask “What’s better, 1 or 2?” where “1” is the right eye view and “2” is the left eye view.) That way, if one eye sees an image sharper than the other, you can equalize the views between the eyes, assuming of course both eyes are capable of approximately equal acuity.
Speaking of the “funny eye exam methods,” I went to a new eye doctor yesterday, because I moved, and he didn’t ask “1 or 2,” it was “Can you read this?” “A X C” ::switches lenses in the middle:: “Or is this better?”
He kept asking if I could read it or not, when I answered “yes” he would get me to start it, and then switch it in the middle! Frustrating city!
I did not know they added numbers to the eye charts. He asked me to read a line and I was not sure of the last 2. They were a 5 and a 3. I just said you have a curvy E there that points the wrong direction.