Your eyes are the window to your soul, or at least that’s what some people call them. Taking care of your eyes is important regardless of whether you have them checked regularly or not. Even if you wear glasses, contact lens or nothing at all on your eyes you should still routinely have your eyes checked. One of the major concerns people have about proper eye care comes from things they hear or read and seem frightening. However, most of these details are myths. Here are six of the biggest myths about eye care.
1. Failure to Use Proper Glasses Will Hurt Your Eyes
This statement isn’t super clear cut. While it is beneficial overall to use proper glasses or contacts for your eyes, not using any kind of eye protection won’t damage your sight any further. Some kids do have eye problems that can be protected with glasses, and it’s important that they wear them, but not using their glasses won’t make their eyesight any worse or slow down the healing process. The loss of eyesight occurs for a number of reasons with most of them being internal, so not using your glasses or contacts all the time won’t damage your eyes any further.
2. There’s Nothing You Can Do to Prevent Sight Loss
While some of the causes of eyesight may be external there are also many things you can do to prevent sight loss. One of those things includes going to get your eyes checked regularly by a professional. The importance of having your eyes checked by a professional cannot be stressed enough as consulting with a professional will allow them to customize eye care to fit your personal needs. You can actually even reverse partial sight loss with safe eye surgery which you can learn more about if you click here.
3. Watching Too Much TV Will Damage Your Eyes
Despite the numerous claims that watching too much television or looking too closely at your phone screen will damage your retinas, there is actually no concrete evidence to suggest that this is true. The only real side effect that people experience when sitting too close to a TV or phone screen is a mild headache, but that’s about it. So while it is also suggested that you shouldn’t spend too much time in front of a screen for general purposes of well-being, don’t be afraid to get close and personal to a TV screen for a short while.
4. Eating Carrots Will Improve Your Vision
While carrots are naturally healthy and a good food choice you don’t need to be gobbling down carrots by the bag. Carrots are high in Vitamin A, which is a vitamin needed for sight. However, only a small amount of this vitamin is needed for eyesight so consuming large amounts of carrots won’t give you super-vision unfortunately.
5. Reading within the Dark will harm Your Eyes
This is another old wives’ tale. While people will tell you not to read in the dark due to the damage it will cause to your eyes there is not sufficient evidence to suggest that this is nothing more than a myth. Reading in the dark may cause eye fatigue, but it will not damage your eyesight one bit.
6. You Should Only Get Your Eyes Checked if You’re Having Sight Issues
It’s easy to think that just because our eyes aren’t going bad that we don’t need to have them checked, but routine eye appointments are more important than we realize. Everyone should have their eyes checked at least once a year. You may not be having symptoms of eye loss, but it’s important to check anyway just to be certain and secure.
We hope these debunked myths will put you at ease about eye care. The biggest takeaway from this article is that you should have a routine eye exam at least once a year and that most of the things you think are damaging your eyes really have no effect on your eyesight. So feel free to read in the dark and watch TV, but lay off all the carrots. They won’t make you Superman.
