Eye Flashes of Light

If you experience eye flashes of light, you might be a bit alarmed by them at first. You could see eye floaters or spots as well that look like there is something in your eye. Maybe it has even become so annoying that you try to remove it from your eye or try to focus on it so you can get whatever it is out and then you discover it moves when your eye moves.

To understand this, you need to know what causes eye flashes of light, eye floaters and spots. Usually this is due to posterior vitreous detachments, called PVDs. In very rare cases, it could be from a retinal tear or detachment.

Knowing that it comes from PVD can be helpful but what causes these in the first place? This gel-like substance fills the back of the eye and will press against the retina and attach some to the retina. Over time, the gel that's in the middle of the eye gets a bit more liquefied. Then the central gel cannot support the thicker, heavier gel and the thicker gel can collapse into the center, watery gel.

When these tiny pieces detach and float around the eye, you actually see the shadows passing in front of your retina, not the pieces of debris themselves. This is why when you try to move your eye or focus on it, it seems like they are drifting.

This is also why the eye flashes of light seem worse when you look into a direct light or stare at a computer monitor. Light flashes during the process of floaters means that traction is applied to your retina during the PVD. This increases your risk for a retinal tear.

Lisa Mason is a freelance writer with a specialty in Internet content and SEO articles and the author of How to Earn a Living Writing for the Internet as well as two poetry anthologies and a how-to poetry book. She has written thousands of articles, hundreds of ebooks and thousands of website pages and related content.

Professional wordsmith for hire: gamer, wife, mother, entrepreneur, published poet, co-owner of game guides company, public speaker and Internet business consultant. You can learn more or follow Lisa's blog from her website.

Protection Means Quality Not Style

Finding the right protection for your eyes requires more than sizing up the right style. For protection from the harmful UV A and UV B rays of the sun you need a high quality pair of sunglasses that have been manufactured to specific optical standards so that they are distortion free and have a full 100 percent protection from the sun's damaging ultraviolet rays. UV rays enter the eye through the pupil. When pupils are dilated more rays enter the eye through the widened pupil. Sunglasses that are dark but that have limited UV protection can cause greater damage to an eye over those that are exposed to direct sunlight without any sunglass protection.

Originally designed for pilots flying in the lower atmosphere, Ray Ban sunglasses were the first sunglasses to be specifically designed to block out the bright light of the sun and give the wearer protection from the effects of ultraviolet light. The RayBan Aviator was aptly named for the pilots that wore them and have been produced by RayBan since the 1940s. As styles of sunglasses have changed over the years the RayBan Aviator has been a staple of the sunglasses manufacturer and continues to be popular today.

The RayBan lens that has also withstood the test of time is a gray green color that is darkened to allow only fifteen percent of natural light to pass through the lens. The G-15 lens was originally produced to cut the glare and brightness of the sun at high altitudes and has done the job so well that other manufacturers including Smith Optics, Bolle and Persol has patterned their sunglasses lenses on allowing only fifteen percent of the light to penetrate the lens. When looking for a pair of sunglasses chose quality first and fashion second and you will look stylish and be protected from the harmful effects of the sun.

Sunglasses Only (http://www.sunglassesonly.com/) is a Bolle sunglasses men's accessories. Jonathan Wickham is a freelance writer.

Contact Lens Options For Baby Boomers - Bifocal Soft Contact Lenses For Eyes Turning 40

If you are like the typical contact lens wearer and have recently reached the grand old age of 40, you may find yourself holding that book a little farther away from you to clear up the letters. At some point your arms actually become just a little too short to read the morning paper, and the phone book that keeps shrinking the text size, well you know the problem.

In the past, most contact lens wearers simply switched back to glasses at this stage of their life. Those of us who are known as the baby boomers are not accepting discontinuing contact lens wear when the eye starts losing it's ability to accommodate, or change focus between distance and near vision. Though the cause is still being argued, many eye doctors believe the continued growth of the lens in the eye, hardening of the lens tissue over time, and a small displacement of the lens forward all contribute to the loss of focusing ability for close vision that degrades between the ages of 40 and 60.

In our Northern Colorado contact lens practice, over time we have evolved what seems to work best for most contact lens wearers facing this change in life. For some people it is very traumatic, being the first experience and awareness they have of the aging of their body.

The old options were threefold:

1. Stop wearing contact lenses and go back to glasses
2. Keep wearing contact lenses for distance vision and wear reading glasses over the contact lenses when you need to work at near
3. Wear a contact lens on one eye for distance and a contact lens on the other eye for reading

While these methods worked for some people very well, they left much to be desired. Inevitably bifocal contact lenses were destined to be developed and they were. Soft bifocal contact lenses are made several different ways but they all share in common some form of simultaneous viewing of distance and near vision. This presents the brain with somewhat of a dilemma in learning which image to attend to. When I say image it is a little misleading. We are usually not referring to double vision but funny feelings and ghost like rings or altered depth perception appearances up close. The brain can usually adapt to this given enough time, and learn to filter out the visual abnormalities.

The types of designs we work with include:

1. Annular lenses with a small central zone 2-3 millimeters in diameter, to fit in line with the black pupil area. A secondary area surrounds this to the edge of the lens. The lenses usually come in a distance version where the small central zone in front of the pupil has your distance prescription for maximum distance clarity. Surrounding this is the near zone for reading which has a small overlap over the edges of the pupil.
2. The reverse design is usually made for the same lens with the near vision correction being a small central zone in front of the pupil for maximum reading, surrounded by a distance prescription that extends to the edge of the lens.
3. Some soft contact lenses achieve a similar effect by gradually changing the prescription from the center to the lens edge.
4. Lastly, one contact lens company utilizes a different type of optics and has multiple surrounding rings alternating distance and near focal distances resembling a bulls eye target.

So what have our years of experience taught us?

• Patients who expect perfect vision are rarely happy with soft bifocal contact lenses.
• People who have clear goals in their minds of the specific tasks that are important to them for seeing well with contact lenses tend to do very well.
• Patients who set their expectations on being able to function about 3/4 of the time with contact lenses and expect to need some form of glasses occasionally over the contacts to read extra fine print or drive through a mountain blizzard at midnight do very well.
• It takes a while to adapt and usually a few adjustments of the prescription to reach the best correction we can achieve.
• A reasonable goal is to see 20/20 distance vision in your dominant eye and 20/40 distance vision in your eye that is not dominant. That usually allows enough overlap for adequate near vision without too much difference between the eyes.
• The distance center eye usually ends up with a lower bifocal power than the near center eye.

Some contact lens companies are adapting this philosophy and utilizing overlap between the two lenses in the intermediate ranges of 3 to 7 feet. This a very different philosophy than trying to fit a true distance and near bifocal lens on both eyes but it seems to be what works best today.

Then there are people with very specific tasks. I have some patients who only wear contact lenses for skiing and don't need perfect distance vision or perfect near vision, just enough to see where they are going. Contact lenses prevent the problem of eye glasses fogging under goggles. In this case under correcting both eyes a little works wonders. Or some people just want lenses for distance for a night out on the town, maybe with one lens designed to allow reading a normal sized menu. The options are endless and you can take heart from my 96 year old patient who still loves her royal blue contact lenses. It's never to late to try something new!

Do you want to continue wearing contact even though you are struggling with your near work and computer screen? Are dry eyes, pinkeye, blurred vision or other problems like, glaucoma, problems after LASIK surgery, nutritional eyecare needs or general eye care? If you live in Northern Colorado and are interested in what a Fort Collins Eye Doctors Office can do to help pick up the phone and call now-970-226-0959. If your have dry eyes that are gritty,sandy, burning and disrupting your life we are the Expert Fort Collins Contact Lenses Optometrist Center in Northern Colorado. Relief is on its way when you contact our patient centered office where your needs come first.

Central location for Fort Collins, Loveland, Wellington, Timnath,co, Windsor, LaPorte and Northern Colorado at 181 West Boardwalk Suite 201. Parking couldn't be any easier!