Q: Patients often ask us if they should schedule an annual eye examination. The answer depends.
A: Many people should have a medical eye exam each year, not just a screening at your family physician office or your child’s pediatrician. For kids, the major difference is your eye doctor’s ability and instrumentation to diagnose “lazy eye” and subtle eye muscle misalignments. Screenings are pretty good for finding distance blur unless the child “peeks” around the eye cover, which often happens. Near vision focusing and eye alignment problems are more subtle and harder to find. Your family eye doctor will be thinking about these issues and do the “detective” work to diagnose them. Generally, an annual exam from age two through 16 is recommended.
Older people have other concerns like silent eye diseases and systemic diseases that affect our eyes. Generally, these issues are far more treatable and controllable, if not fully curable, when found early. We spend most of our time in your eye exam asking about and looking for indications of diseases. Yes, doing your refraction to arrive at your ideal vision correction is essential, but our concerns are finding and preventing any loss of your eyesight due to pathology. Glaucoma, diabetic or hypertensive eye damage, and a host of other vascular problems can damage your eyes. Sometimes, we must order lab work and/or imaging like CT or MRI scans to rule out more serious pathology. Even skin cancers of the eyelids and dry eye disease are on our minds when we use the biomicroscope to examine your eyes. Because these are “quiet” diseases without pain or vision blur many times, annual exams are best to prevent any eyesight loss.
The “ middle years” usually have fewer eye disease concerns, so more people could safely have an eye exam every other year between age 18 and 45. The exception would be contact lens wearers, who will need new contacts each year, and any vision change or concern like dryness can be better solved annually.
Best of all, just ask your eye doctor when they think your next exam should be. I will add that most patients do not understand insurance coverages for eye care. Vision plans are intended for only vision changes….they pay toward your eyewear and/or contact lenses and toward your eye exam…..unless you have a medical eye concern. Vision plans require us to bill your exam to your medical or health insurance whenever there is a medical concern. Fortunately, your regular health insurance does pay toward your eye exam and medical eye testing as needed, without annual limitations, but not toward vision testing or correction. Eye care is the only medical specialty where we can use either coverage to help reduce the cost of your care!