Eye doctor reveals the one thing you should never do which 'could affect your vision permanently'
Gerrard Kaonga
Featured Image Credit: Peter Finch/Jonathan Storey/Getty Images
An eye doctor has revealed the simple things you should never do if you want to keep your vision and eyes as healthy as possible.
Despite our eyes being one of our most important organs, it is amazing how much we put them through.
And one incredibly bad habit a lot of people do could permanently affect your vision.
In fact, in a worst case scenario you could 'lose your eyeball'.
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Speaking on the Am I Doing it Wrong podcast, ophthalmologist and assistant professor at Oregon Health & Science University’s Casey Eye Institute, Dr. Amanda Redfern spoke about the importance of eye health.
Most notably, she highlighted some of the most important things to remember if you tend to wear contact lenses.
″[Sleeping with contact lenses in your eyes] is bad. It’s real bad. Don’t do it,” she said.
“It’s like a game of Russian roulette.”
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Yikes. She explained this was because by doing this you can get a corneal ulcer, which is an infection on part of the eye that a contact covers.
An infection can just be the start of all the issues that will follow.
Redfern continued: “It’s not going to happen every time, but when it happens, it’s terrible.
“It can be so bad you could, in really terrible cases, lose your eyeball.”
In the less severe situations... you could just permanently impact your vision. Double yikes.
She said: “If that scar is in the center of your vision, that could affect your vision permanently, unless you get a corneal transplant."
Beyond this, she emphasized it was important to keep contact lenses as clean as possible and not wear them during activities that could jeopardize or contaminate them.
This included things like swimming in a pool, lake or even wearing them while showering.
She explained: “The problem with contact lenses is that it will sandwich bacteria between the lens and your cornea, and you can get infected and then have all the complications we talked about.
“In general, we frown upon anything where your eye is going to expose to something non-sterile.”
All sounds terrible, so don’t say you were never warned.