Eye health is often overlooked. Tons of Americans skip their annual eye exams: Of those who are considered to be at high risk for vision loss, which is roughly 4 in 10 Americans, 40% didn’t get their eyes checked out in the past year, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
“It’s not until you have [a] problem with your eyes that you really become grateful for your vision,” said Dr. Michelle Holmes, an optometrist at Pacific Neuroscience Institute in Santa Monica, California.
There’s a lot you can do to protect your eye health. You can keep up with your annual eye exams, wear sunglasses to shield your eyes from the sun’s harmful ultraviolet rays, and avoid wearing contacts to bed or in the pool, to name a few.
But is there one habit you should never do, even though it may seem like eye care: Don’t use eye-whitening, or red-eye relieving, drops.
“My concern with those types of eye drops is that eye-whitening drops can be used by someone to mask redness, and, oftentimes, that redness is a symptom of some more serious underlying condition,” Holmes told HuffPost.