"Prevention and Education Can Cure Eye Disease..." 'Judith Whitehead' (Inspirational Monday's)

   Guest blogger Judith Whitehead from Amherst, N.Y.  has  worked in  the ophthalmology field for more than 25 years...  blogs about  one of things she knows best, eye disease on this Inspirational Monday!

I spend the majority of my week working in the health field of Ophthalmology. Day after day I work on people with various eye aliments for a most prominent, dedicated, Glaucoma/Cataract specialist in Williamsville, NY. We see people of all walks of life, but the most disheartening are the ones who are going, or have gone blind from Glaucoma; Glaucoma is a disease that painlessly robs a persons vision, slowly eating

away at the peripheral vision until total vision is lost. The sad thing is that this serious eye disease is treatable and if caught in the early stages, can be halted. Glaucoma showsno economical boundaries; it will attack wealthy or poor, healthy or sick people of all ages.

There are two reasons people loose their eyesight to glaucoma, they are ignorance, or lack of money. There are thousands of people who don’t really know what glaucoma is. Although there are many types of glaucoma, the most common one is painless. There are only subtle symptoms at first, peripheral vision loss. It can go unnoticed until the optic nerve becomes damaged and peripheral vision loss becomes permanent.

There are simple tests performed on a routine eye exam that screens for these findings that only a trained eye professional can perform. Testing the eye pressure is a painless simple way to detect if the pressure is too high for the eye to tolerate. Glaucoma also runs in family lines and is very prominent among the Afro-Americans.

The second reason people go blind from glaucoma is lack of money. There are millions of people in our country that do not have health care benefits. They are not just homeless people, but people living among us that have homes and families but cannot afford health care benefits. Their first and foremost priority is to feed their families and provide for them. Just getting through the month on a fixed income is challenge enough for them.

Routine health exams are not an option for them and preventive medicine is out of the question. They may know that they have glaucoma, but they choose to ignore it, because they can’t afford the medication needed to use on a daily basis to prevent vision loss.

Glaucoma is sneaky; and drops only maintain vision from that point. Drops don’t cure the disease as medication for other illnesses may . Drops taken for a month from a sample given at the Doctors office don’t cure the disease. People with insurance plans usually pay a co-pay for these drugs at the pharmacy; if you are unfortunate enough not to have insurance, drops can range anywhere from $50.00 to $95.00 a bottle. There are also special laser treatments and surgeries that can treat the disease that are costly if there is no insurance to cover the cost.

I speak of only eye disease in this article, because I have witnessed first hand for many years how sad this can be for families; this is a huge problem in many countries. The United States of America is one of the richest countries of all but lacks provisions for the needy, homeless and poor.

 We need to find a better way to educate and provide for all walks of life. It is so very unjust that the educated and financially secure people have the upper hand on their health, when prevention can keep so many from failing health. The cost of new drugs on the market is skyrocketing; drugs cannot become generic until several years have passed after a paten. Our congressman need to make this problem a priority on their agenda and come up with new programs to provide for the needy.

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