Simple tips to save your eyesight?

The Fred Hollows Foundation has tied up with L’Occitane to fund efforts to end avoidable blindness among Filipinos.

Did you know that four out of five people who are blind could have prevented their blindness?

The most common cause of avoidable blindness is cataracts, and removing them is a “very easy, simple and cheap surgery,” according to Mardi Mapa-Suplido, country manager of The Fred Hollows Foundation, an NGO focused on ending avoidable blindness worldwide.

“Seventy-five percent of all blindness is from cataracts,” adds Dr. Maria Victoria Rondaris, assistant vice chair of the Department of Health Eye Center. Aging causes it, so you can’t prevent or stop it from growing, but you can treat it and manage it.”

Cataract surgery is fully covered by PhilHealth if you go to a government hospital like PGH or East Avenue, “but even if you have PhilHealth and live, for example, in Bais, Negros Oriental, there’s no government hospital there that can do the surgery,” Suplido notes.?“And there are very few of us (who can do the surgery),” Rondaris says, “1,600 all over the Philippines — and most of us are in the cities of Manila, Cebu, and Davao.”?That means that people in the provinces who need cataract surgery have to go to Metro Manila, so the Fred Hollows Foundation, in partnership with the Department of Health, is trying to equip provincial government hospitals so ophthalmologists can perform the surgeries there for free.?

Have bad vision? wear glasses!

Another common cause of avoidable blindness is refractive errors in eyeglasses, meaning if your vision is bad and you’re too scared or vain to go to a doctor to have your eyes checked, you could risk going blind.

“When you can just see the ‘E’ on the Snellen chart and not the lower letters,” that’s a big warning sign, according to Rondaris.

To help Filipinos preserve their eyesight, The Fred Hollows Foundation recently tied up with L’Occitane, the French beauty brand whose main advocacy is eye health.

“You can see on all of L’Occitane’s packaging they have braille, even on the bottles,” says Mica Agdamag, Rustan’s ad and PR manager. “L’Occitane has an exclusive Shea Butter set for this collaboration, which is P360; and the Aromachologie set, which is P420. Part of the proceeds will go to the Fred Hollows Foundation this month, and for World Sight Day.”

Sight saviors: Dr. Maria Victoria Rondaris, assistant vice chair of the Department of Health Eye Center (left) and Mardi Mapa-Suplido, country manager of The Fred Hollows Foundation

Oct. 11 was World Sight Day (every year it’s held on the second Thursday of October), and Fred Hollows set up free vision screenings at L’Occitane’s Glorietta branch with optometrists.

Suplido says the proceeds from the L’Occitane sets will fund two efforts: a school eye-health program to train teachers to screen their students’ vision, and equipping provincial hospitals to be able to do cataract surgeries in far-flung provinces.

“That’s another sad thing: younger and younger kids have a hard time seeing, and the sadder part is a lot of teachers and parents don’t know about it,” she says. “I’ve met even doctors who didn’t know their child could not read; yun pala they cannot see because it’s not part of the school’s practice to check your child.”

There is a rise in eye problems among the youth because of devices, “but it’s not actually the device that’s causing the poor vision, it’s staying inside the house while playing with the device,” Rondaris reveals. “It’s sunlight that stimulates the eyes to grow so that vision will improve, but most of our children now don’t play with other kids outside; they stay inside the house and do laptop, tablets.”

Research recommends playing for an hour every week in sunlight to reduce myopia or nearsightedness. “There’s research now proving if it’s really the gadget (causing the eye problems), but now they know it’s lack of sunlight for kids.”

They debunk another myth: that watching too close to the TV is bad for you. “If a child is watching close to the TV, that’s already a clue for the parent that something’s wrong with their eyesight,” Rondaris says. “It’s not the TV itself.  There have been reports about the blue light coming from the TV and screens of devices, but it’s not yet been proven.”

To make sure your child’s eye health is good, Rondaris and Suplido recommend having frequent checkups, and the younger your child is, the more frequent they should be. “Because the eyes of a child stop growing by age 18 to 20,” Rondaris says. “At birth they are farsighted — not yet 20/20 — and by the age of two to four, their vision should be 20/20. If the parents have glasses at a young age, you can expect the child will also wear glasses because it’s hereditary. The golden age is eight, so you should be able to correct the child’s vision at seven or eight otherwise they get lazy eye even if you give them glasses.”

Suplido adds we also need to protect our eyes from the sun with sunglasses with UV filters (not just tint), so we don’t get pterygium, tissue growth in the corner of the eye that gradually covers the pupil and leads to vision loss. “It’s a common affliction in fishermen,” she notes.

Now we know that caring for our eyes is simpler than we thought, we can take the necessary steps to preserve our vision.

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L’Occitane’s Shea Butter and Aromachologie sets are available at Rustan’s The Beauty Source.

To contact The Fred Hollows Foundation, visit www.hollows.org, call 718-9500 or email msuplido@hollows.org.