A regular eye exams is recommended to check your prescription and to evaluate the health of your eyes. Many eye diseases have no apparent symptoms until significant damage has already occurred. Early diagnosis and treatment are important for maintaining good vision and preventing permanent vision loss.

Routine eye exams typically are conducted by licensed, certified doctors of optometry. If serious problems are detected that require further analysis and treatment, optometrists can quickly and confidently consult with and provide referrals to ophthalmologists and other specialists.

An eye examination costs about $100. It may or may not be covered by insurance. It begins with information from the patient (case history) and continues with a set of primary tests, plus additional specialized tests given as needed, dictated by the outcomes of initial testing and the patient’s age. The primary tests can be divided into two groups, those that

• evaluate the physical state of the eyes and surrounding areas
• measure the ability to see.

Your eye doctor will use a microscope to examine your eyes. He may dilate your pupils with eye drops and at the end of that he or she will tell you what’s been found out and what, if anything, needs to be done. Perhaps the part of the eye exam that people like the least we call dilation. That means putting eye drops in your eyes to dilate you pupil the black part of you eye. By dilating the pupil the doctor can look through that into the inside of your eye and see your retina and nerve very clearly. That’s a useful part of a comprehensive exam. Now the part that people don’t like is that dilation last for about four hours and up to a day or two in some people and during that time you’ll notice you’re a little bit light sensitive. You can read as well but that’s useful and necessary often to get a really good eye exam. So put up with the discomfort. Refraction means measuring your degree of nearsightedness or farsightedness or astigmatism. That’s what the doctors doing when he says,

“Which is better one or two,”

he’s essentially testing you for glasses, and that’s a common part of the eye exam that’s done most of the time.

Eye exams may also reveal the presence of many non-eye diseases. The frequency of eye exams differs with age and the health of the person. Eye exams can be performed in infants, and if a problem is noted the infant can be seen by a pediatric ophthalmologist. A child with no symptoms should have an eye exam at age three. Early exams are important because permanent decreases in vision (e.g., amblyopia, also called lazy eye) can occur if not treated early (usually by ages 6-9). With no symptoms, the second exam should take place before first grade. After first grade, the American Optometric Association recommends that healthy people with no risk factors have an eye exam every two years; for ages 19-40, every two-to-three years; for ages 41-60, every two years; and annually after that. Patients with risk factors for eye disease (e.g., people with diabetes or a family history of eye disease; African Americans, who are at higher risk for glaucoma) and children who have trouble in school, problems with reading, rub their eyes when reading, etc. may need more frequent checkups.

Another source, The American Academy of Ophthalmology, tells about frequency of checkups:

A new study of five U.S. corporations shows that the companies saved nearly $3 billion annually on health care costs associated with the treatment of chronic diseases detectable via an eye examination.

The length of your eye examination really depends on your specific eyes. An eye exam can range from 30 minutes to 90 minutes depending on what the doctor finds during the examination.

Another interesting thing is that a five-minute eye exam costing about $100 for both eyes might prove to be an inexpensive and effective way to gauge and track the neurological disease multiple sclerosis, potentially complementing costly magnetic resonance imaging to detect brain shrinkage, a characteristic of the disease’s progression. The current standard is MRI testing, which takes at least an hour and costs about $1,200.