Looking after your family's eye health

If you are keen to ensure that you are taking care of your family in all the ways that are important, then eye care is going to be one of the major things to look into. It can be all too easy to overlook your family’s eyes, but these are always an important part of their overall health, and something that actually takes a great deal of care and patience too. In this article, we are going to discuss some of the most important ways to look after your family’s eye health, starting today. Oh, and it doesn't involve a trip to Barnard Castle!


Understanding Your Family History

If you have ever had to get your eyes tested thoroughly for some specific ailment, you will know that it is incredibly important to know a little something about your family history. You might be asked whether there are any particular or severe eye problems in your family’s past, such as glaucoma. If there are, this can impact what issues you and your family are likely to have today, and that is going to be something you need to be aware of on the whole. So it’s often important to first take a dive into your family history and see whether you can discover anything important there.

There are a range of conditions which you are more likely to suffer from if someone in your family’s past suffered from it. Glaucoma, as we have seen, is one. The same applies to myopia, hyperopia, macular degeneration and astigmatism. It is therefore important to look in detail at your family’s past, and to provide this information to your optometrist where possible, so that they have all the information they need when they are testing your eyes and the eyes of your family. If you can do that, you might find that these issues are found quicker.


Types Of Eye Problem

It can be helpful to know about some of the major types of eye problems which can occur, so that you know what to look out for and prepare for. There are a few major and common issues that can arise with anyone’s eyes, including numerous different ways in which you might find yourself struggling to see perfectly. Let’s take a look at some of the common types of eye problems, so that you can hopefully get to grips with it as soon as possible.


One of the more serious eye conditions is glaucoma, which is actually the leading cause of blindness all over the world. This condition is essentially a build-up of pressure behind the eye, which in turn damages the optic nerves that you need to be intact in order to see properly. This condition can only be diagnosed by an eye doctor, and there are a number of things you can do at home to help prevent it in yourself and in the eyes of your children.

First up, you could consider eating as healthy a diet as possible. Not only does eating right help with most other health issues, it also helps in keeping you from developing glaucoma, so it really does work and is worth thinking about. In particular, if you have a diet that is rich in vitamins A, C and E, as well as zinc, you will find that you are much less likely to end up with this terrible disease. That means eating more oranges, strawberries, broccoli, eggs, and spinach. If you are finding it difficult to get all of that into your diet, you could always consider a vitamin supplement too, to make it a little easier.

But it’s not just glaucoma that we all need to be worried about when we are trying to take care of our family’s eyes. There are also other common issues, such as myopia. This is what is otherwise known as nearsightedness, and it essentially means that the individual in question can see perfectly up close, but not so well for far-off things. Myopia has strong links to familial history, so if someone in your family has had it before, it is more likely one of your current family will get it too.


The main way to ensure that you avoid getting myopia, or at least reduce your chances, is to rest your eyes regularly. This might be especially important if you do any work that requires that your eyes look at anything for long periods of time, such as a screen, a book, or really anything else at all. Again, you can also improve myopia through an improved diet - which is also true of the next problem that can strike anyone: hyperopia, or farsightedness. That is, obviously enough, the exact opposite of myopia, and again it has a strong genetic component to it, meaning you are much more likely to have it if someone in your family does or did have it in the past.


Good Practice

Enough on what can go wrong with your eyes - what can you actually do, individually and as a family unit, to keep your eyes in good health? We have seen one major step that you can take already, which is to eat a healthy diet, and that is something that might be worth considering. On top of that, there are also a range of good practices which you might like to follow, and which are likely to help you and your family retain good sight, and make the most of the eyesight quality that you have been blessed with.

Arguably the most important of all of these practices is to simply go to the optometrist regularly. Ideally, we would all go to have our eyes checked at least once every two years, and if your optometrist finds anything wrong there they might argue that it is time to increase this regularity to once every year or even once every six months. Of course, your optometrist will also be able to tell you whether you are likely to benefit from having glasses, and if you are then you can either shop with them for those or go here to look at some of the options you have online.


As well as regular visits to the optometrist and a good diet, you could think about trying out some other commonly recommended health changes. For instance, if you are a smoker, you might like to know that giving up smoking has been proven to improve your eye health, for the simple fact that smoking increases the risk of age-related macular degeneration. Likewise, keeping the alcohol consumption within the recommended limits can help to avoid the same.

Another important concern is the sun, which can cause damage to your eyes as a result of the UVA and UVB rays. It is therefore a wise move to cover up in the sun, so as to ensure that your eyes do not get damaged in this way, and that they are going to last for much longer on the whole.

Finally, we can all take a little more care when it comes to health and safety, as it is of course going to be a problem if you cause physical damage to your eye in some way or another, whether you are at work or at home, or somewhere else.

If you take all this on board, it’s likely that you and your family are going to have better eye health in no time, and be much less likely to experience any kind of eyesight problems later on in life too.


This is a collaborative post.
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