Optometrist

A few years ago, Marcus was having trouble with reading. He kept getting headaches, so his mum took him to the optometrist.

Optometrists are trained to examine your eyes to see if they are healthy, measure your vision and work out whether glasses will improve it.

Optometrists do not treat serious eye diseases or perform eye surgery but they can find and monitor eye problems. Some optometrists also specialise in low vision and help people to make the most of their remaining vision.

The optometrist asked Marcus about his eyes, and about other people in his family. Marcus had to cover one eye at a time, then look at the eye chart on the other side of the room. Next he tried on a pair of googly glasses with changing lenses (phoropter), to see if wearing glasses would help him see better.

Marcus looked at a book of coloured dot pictures (Ishihara) to see if he could see any patterns in the dots.

The optometrist said that glasses wouldn't make any difference to Marcus' vision. She told him that his vision problems were caused by an eye disease and she referred him to see an eye doctor.