Eye Exams

An eye exam at Iron Horse Optometric might be a bit different than your old place. Here’s what you can expect.

Most exams start here at the infrared scan. As you stare into the peephole, the instrument shines safe & invisible infrared light (the same your TV remote uses) at the lenses of your eyes, measuring both the curvature & the focusing power of the lenses of your eyes. It takes a few seconds, but this data gets the doctor to your correct prescription in a fraction of the time. The curvature maps also help the doctor achieve a perfect contact lens fit and diagnose lens deformities.

Gone are the days of manually turning mechanical dials or shining eye charts through mirrors. Computer-networked instruments allow the doctor to electronically dial in to your perfect prescription and show you the difference between your new & old prescriptions at the touch of a button.

No air puff. We can measure your eye pressures, a necessary step in catching glaucoma (a blinding disease when left undiagnosed) without the awful air puff.

A comprehensive eye exam isn’t complete without a thorough check of the health of the inside back of your eyes, which the doctor performs with the microscopes. But beyond the microscopes, we offer two additional ways to safely & painlessly scan the back of your eyes.

In less than 1 second per eye, the wide-field Optomap scans out 200 degrees to the far corners of the insides of your eyeballs. This allows the doctor to catch problem areas that would only be caught with dilating eye drops. Some doctors say this is equivalent to getting your eyes dilated. Some doctors say it’s even better. Usually (but not always) the Optomap removes the need to have your eyes dilated.

In the Optomap image below, the lighter-colored box represents how much of the back of the eye the doctor can typically view at one time, even through dilated eyes. As you can see (pun intended), the Optomap opens up a much wider viewing angle for the doctor to catch anything suspicious.

The next laser doesn’t scan out wide, but it scans eleven layers deeper than what the doctor can see in the microscope. The Optical Coherence Tomographer (OCT) gives the doctor cross-sectional views of the back of your eye similar to an MRI or CT scan. This technology allows us to catch hidden deposits common in macular degeneration, areas of thinning which can warn of glaucoma a decade early, and even life-threatening tumors.

In the retinal cross-sectional scan below, the surface is digitally color-coded green to indicate normal retinal thickness. No, healthy retinas are not green.

The exam is topped off with something completely low-tech: an old-fashioned explanation of all the results in a way that you can understand. Expect to leave with a solid understanding of your eye health and your vision needs.

Did we say no air puff?