Your eyes are one of the most important organs in your body.  They are also the most delicate.

Sore Eyes

The most common cause of a sore eye just on one side is a bit of dirt or grit under the eyelid. Sore or irritated eyes on both sides usually means either an allergy (the same way that hayfever causes irritation of the nose) or an eye infection called conjunctivitis.

What helps?  For a sore eye on one side only, get an adult to look carefully at your eye for something in the eye.  Run the eye under cold water or get someone to use a wet cotton bud to remove the grit.  Be careful not to scratch the surface of the eye.

If it doesn’t come out easily, or both eyes are sore, see your doctor.

Short-Sightedness

People are short-sighted if they see close things well but distant things are blurry. If you can’t see the blackboard at school from the back of the classroom, you are probably short-sighted.  It can also cause headaches. Doctors call short-sightedness “myopia”.  It is caused by a minor abnormality in the shape of your eyeball. Short-sightedness is linked with being intelligent and it also tends to run in families.

What helps? Short-sightedness is easily fixed by wearing glasses.

Long-Sightedness

Long-sightedness is the opposite of short-sightedness, and means that you can see distant things very well but things near you seem blurry.  Like short-sightedness, it is caused by a minor abnormality in the shape of the eyeball.  Long-sightedness is very common, and can cause headaches because the person has to strain to focus to read.

What helps?  Long-sightedness is easily fixed by wearing glasses, especially for reading.

Visual Impairment & Blindness

To be visually impaired means that a person cannot see properly.  Blindness can mean not being able to see at all, or only being able to see a little light or shadow.  Visual impairment or blindness can be caused by a problem in the pathway that takes light from your eyes to the vision centres in the brain.

Common causes of this include damage to the eye, cataracts (where the lens window at the front of the eye becomes hazy) or glaucoma (high pressure in the eye).

Having 20/20 vision means that you have average vision and can read the second bottom line on an eye chart.