9) 1% Cyclogyl Dilated Eye Exam

Using drops with 1% Cyclogel dilates the pupil and relaxes the lens, allowing your doctor to achieve a more accurate measurement of nearsightedness or farsightedness and to ensure that the retina and internal eye are healthy.

There are two reasons to perform this part of the exam prior to refractive surgery.

1. Most people understand that a dilating drop makes the pupil big. The reason this is important is that it allows us to look inside your eye with our lights to make sure the retina and internal eye are healthy prior to proceeding.
2. The second reason deals with a response known as "accommodation". It is a bit complicated but let us make sense of this for you since it is so important.

• Accommodation is the process our eyes use to read.
• When we read, the lens inside your eye that sits right behind your pupil gets more fat or curved. This curvature of the lens makes a person more nearsighted so they can read.
• During an eye exam, when a person is looking at the eye chart, they can involuntarily try to focus on the eye chart and stimulate the accommodation response.
• If a person does this, they will measure more nearsighted (or less farsighted) than they really are. How do we handle this accommodation response in your exam? This is the second reason for the dilating drops.
• The drop called Cyclogyl not only dilates the pupil but it relaxes the muscle that changes the shape of the lens.
• This relaxing of the lens muscle process allows us to measure the level of nearsightedness or farsightedness when your eye is in its totally relaxed state.
• Often we will find that someone is quite a bit less nearsighted than we thought they were. This test helps us maximize the chance that you will have a stable, unchanging correction after we are done with your laser vision correction.

  There are some types of dilating drops that make the pupil big but do not relax the lens. Just making the pupil big is good for an internal exam but it does not relax the lens and give us the important information necessary to deliver an accurate treatment to you.

  This also is an important test for a fine tune surgery. Remember, you want to have drops put in your eyes not only to make your pupil big, but to relax your lens for accurate measurements. The drop we believe works the best and is most practical for this is 1% Cyclogyl.

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