Which do you want first, the good news or the bad news?
How about the bad first… and we’ll make it quick. It turns out the vast majority of vision loss happens because of something that goes wrong with the retina. Your retinas are fragile and delicate, yet still charged with the monumental task of gathering in what you see and sending it on to your brain for “processing.” It is precisely because they are so delicate that they’re so good at doing what they do.
Unfortunately, it doesn’t take much at all to damage or destroy a retina. Even more unfortunately, without normal retinas, your eyes cease to see. Any one of a large number of diseases, if allowed to gain a foothold, are capable of bringing down your eyesight.
Now, enter the good news! If there was a way to visualize your retinas so carefully that they could be evaluated down to the level of a few microns, virtually nothing would be able to hide. If we could view your retinal tissue layer by layer, undetectable problems would become exposed and marginally suspicious findings would become obvious. What a breakthrough that would be!
We now have an instrument that can do just that! … sniff out the most minor issues that are on their way to becoming major ones. Our Ocular Coherence Tomographer (OCT for short) is quite a marvel of technology. In just a few seconds per eye, this instrument peeks inside your eye, conducts a scan of your retina, gathers millions of data points and displays the findings.
But that’s not all! The instrument operator can then take those images and turn them in various 3-D perspectives to visualize any small defects that might be in question. That gives us the best view from the best angle in the finest detail to find the smallest defects.
So what’s that good for? Glaucoma directly affects the retina. Macular degeneration directly affects the retina. Diabetes directly affects the retina. Each one of these is a potentially blinding disorder. Now our office is able to detect problems from all of these before they even become visible using conventional means. And other retinal diseases, though they be less common, are also pretty important if they happen to be in your eyes! And if we can find it, we can very often fix it.
So come in and allow us the opportunity to scan your eyes with some of the best technology on the planet. You might end up being very glad you did!
