Welcome to Eyecare Insight with Dr. Kyle Tate your Jenks eye doctor. Todays post is coming to you from the American Academy of Optometry in Chicago 2017. This conference is a great place to learn the newest latest and greatest techniques in Eyecare new medications coming out lots of good things for patients also got a lot of new information for you guys today as you know Insight Eyecare is located in Glenpool across the IHOP or clinic has a large optical gal or over 1000 eyeglasses to me all eyewear wants and needs we use of the greatest glasses lenses in the country to give to you the best vision possible out of your glasses.
Today I was in four hours of lecture about scleral contact lenses. Now remember scleral contact lenses are for patients that usually have eye problems more than blurry vision. Scleral contact lenses are for things like keratoconus significant scars on the eyes, and also for extremely dry eyes. These types of contacts are for people who used to could only wear hard contacts. Now these are a much more comfortable type of contact even though they are still more rigid like a rigid gas permeable contact. These contacts can be comfortably worn all day without worry of them coming off the eye and getting lost. Wearing scleral contacts are also much more comfortable in the wind whereas the old rigid gas permeable contacts were not. These contacts have been around for hundreds of years and were actually first made out of glass. Recently they’ve become much more popular and obviously are not made of glass anymore. They are made of a type of plastic that allows more oxygen to the eye. These contacts are the main ones that we recommend for people with diseases of the cornea. As your Jenks eye doctor if you’ve ever been told to that soft contacts were not the best for you come see us at Insight Eyecare.
The information that we learned today helped us to know how to fit these contacts better and quicker which provides a better experience for the patient. Some of the main problems that these lenses can have on the eyes is that the scleral contacts will get cloudy. This can happen either really quickly or can happen after a few hours. This may be in the first few minutes or may be after two or three hours aware. We learned out of these new studies is that there’s different ways we can adjust the fit of the lens to help for this. There’s a new contact lens technology that allows the astigmatism of the EYE to be adjusted for the contacts to fit better. This keeps the tears from flowing behind the contact lens which is what causes this vision fogging through the day. There’s some amazing technology out there in Eyecare. As your Jenks EYE doctor, we try and stay on the forefront of this technology. We can use advanced eyes scanning tests to measure how the contact lens fit on the eye. This technology is called OCT. It can be used for things like glaucoma, macular degeneration, diabetes, and macular edema. We use this technology at Insight Eyecare your Jenks eye doctor to measure how close the contact lens is to the EYE. It can show us such small details that we cannot see even with a microscope. This allows us to fit scleral contact lenses to your eyes quicker and more accurately. The benefit for the patient is at the contact are more comfortable and the vision is better in the health of the eye is maintained.
We also learn more about how using scleral contact lenses will fit to the eye and adjust over time. In the old styled rigid gas printable contact lenses, after about six weeks of wearing those that they could actually distort the shape of the eye and change the curves of the eye. The annoying thing for the patient is that this would change their glasses prescription. As their glasses prescription would change they can have a prescription for when they have been wearing their contacts in a prescription if they have not worn their contacts for a few weeks. So those contacts tend to have a lot of problems the old rigid gas permeable. We may have to take the patient out of the rigid gas printable contacts and then their glasses prescription would change and get blurrier and blurrier each day. With the newer scleral contact lenses this is not a problem as it was before. As your Jenks eye doctor we use information like this to try and improve your life.
Scleral contact lenses must be filled with a solution before they are put on the eye. There is actually a gap between the back of the contact lens and the front surface of the eye. This space or gap is filled up with a saliene solution that is put in the lens before the lenses put on the eye. Previously there were not any specified contact lens solutions that were safe to fill scleral contact lenses. Commonly we would prescribed inhalation saline or Addie packs. These are small 5 mL plastic vials of saliene the same salt concentration as the tears that is also used for breathing machines and respiratory purposes. Currently there are four different approved contact lens filling solutions for scleral contacts. Baush and Lomb make scleral fill, Addie packs are still available, lacri lube, and one other that we are not going to mention because we do not approve it at Insight Eyecare your jenks eye doctor.
This is just a little bit of information what we learned at the American Academy of optometry conference fall of 2017. As your Jenks eye doctor. we feel it’s important to stay at the cutting edge of technology and to continually learn. At Insight Eyecare one of our core values is cultivating learning this means that our doctors go and continually educate themselves to keep on top the latest and greatest information so we can better serve our patients. If you are interested in scleral contact lenses give us a call at Insight Eyecare. Our mission is to improve every life in every encounter we want the opportunity to help you help you see better, help you have more comfortable and more healthy eyes. We met an amazing staff it’s there to meet all needs you could think of we have many many eyeglasses frames in stock. As your Jenks eye doctor, remember we treat disease of all different kinds from nearsightedness cataracts glaucoma farsightedness astigmatism keratoconus and many others. Bring us your blurry vision in Sandy gritty feeling eyes, so that we can help improve your life. God bless have a great day
