Practically
Speaking
with James Walker
Past Practical Columns
Recently,
a consumer in a public forum told me that she had not followed her new
electrologist’s advice about after-treatment care for her skin, because she
thought it was a ploy to have her spend money on unnecessary products. I
explained that electrologists who carry products for resale, usually do so for
the convenience of their clients. “Selling is the business of salespeople; it is
not a priority for us,” I said. Then, as an afterthought I added, “Salespeople
will sell you anything they can – and unlike electrologists, they don’t have to
worry about going blind while they’re working at it!”
It was that last (unrehearsed) comment – the bit about electrologists
sacrificing their eyesight for their art – which got me thinking and enquiring
into the reason why so many people coming into our profession with perfectly
good vision require eyeglasses within a year or two. So I asked my many medical
contacts a lot of questions, and this is what I learned.
As everyone knows, doing lots of close-up work for extended periods will
eventually lead to the eyes’ version of muscle cramp. The technical term for
this is asthenopia (“weakness or rapid fatigue of the eyes, often accompanied by
pain and headaches”), a condition that the average person might pass off as
eyestrain.
Electrologists’ eyes are subjected to the added strain that comes from staring
through a magnification system all day. Ring lamp magnifiers, which are common
to our field, are particularly unkind to our eyes. The curved glasses in these
units bend the light and change the way our eyes view what is in front of us.
They have very small “sweet spots” for us to fixate on; the other areas of the
lens are poorly focused. At best, only one eye can ever get a good focus on any
one spot, which leads us to a condition called anisometropia (“unequal
refractive power in the two eyes”). In addition to confusing our brain (over
which image we are trying to focus on) anisometropia often leads to more
headaches and fatigue.
As an alternative to the ring lamps, many electrologists opt for headband
magnifiers, or for loupes. Unfortunately, headband magnifiers present much the
same faults as the ring lamps. Though loupes bypass many of the problems, they
leave us in need of a light source that is bright enough for our needs, without
being blindingly bright and intolerably hot for the clients. Loupes do not solve
our focal working distance problem and are also heavy on the nose, and neck.
Bending over to accommodate the short “working distance” does nothing good for
our lower back and sciatic muscles either.
Stereomicroscopes solve the problems of perception and clarity of image, and
even come with their own fiber-optic light sources. They have fabulous working
distances, good flexibility of viewing position, and are ergonomically
comfortable. The images are even perceived by the brain as three-dimensional.
Alas, what they don’t address is the vision fatigue that comes from having
reduced the field of vision to one square inch, thereby leaving the eyes focused
for hours on a large image with a short focal distance.
My research shows that the best thing we could do to save our sight – and lower
our chiropractor and massage therapy bills – would be to have a video magnifying
system that focuses on the treatment area and at the same time projects the
image on a large viewing screen a comfortable distance away.
The downside to devising such a system would, of course, be the exorbitant price
tag (and let’s face it, our microsurgery is not in the same league as a
million-dollar, triple bypass operation). Unfortunately, we are not likely to
see much improvement to our current options in the near future.
Until something better comes along, we can make the best of a bad situation by
ensuring that our distance viewing is exercised while we are working – e.g.
looking across the room frequently to allow our eyes to focus on an object, like
a poster or wall plaque, for five to ten seconds. If we want to keep our
eyeglass prescriptions where they are, and maybe even turn them back down a few
notches, we must be as kind as we possibly can to our eyes, and make sure that
the best vision and illumination systems are integrated into our practices. The
sight we save will be our own.
Past Practical Columns
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