| +8.00 Half
Eye Spectacles |
Often,
I find that I need more magnification to quickly look at a lid or
even a conjunctival problem or a contact lens. In these quick
hallway consults, I find it difficult to march the patient back to
a slit lamp. Instead, I carry +8.00 prismatic half eyes which are
fabulous at quickly inspecting anything from an eye to an errant
screw on a frame. They are flat and can be folded neatly in a breast
pocket of a shirt or a white coat and they are relatively
inexpensive. |
| New
Clinical Tip of the Week = Near Point Cards |
Near point cards come in all
sizes. Some cards come in a size larger than a shirt pocket and some
come in a size t hat exactly fits a shirt pocket. Of course,
the larger cards usually give more test optotypes than a smaller
card, but then the flexibility of having a card on your person all
of the time is lost. For myself, I
have chosen smaller cards.
Two especially useful cards are the Runge
Card and a Spanish language card given to me by an optometrist while
I was on a training rotation at a hospital in Mexico.
The Runge card has a series of single letters form 10M to 0.32M in 3
horizontal rows. It's great for right, left and both eyes testing.
The Spanish language card has Spanish text from 0.50M to 1.45M and
is excellent for patients who are mainly fluent in that language.
In the end, having a reading card nearby
seems to be a sign post of being an optometrist as is the inveterate
near fixation target for alternate cover test. Have them and use
them.
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