See for life campaign
We started the See for Life Campaign in our Vancouver clinic in April 2011 in response to a story on Global News about a photographer that had suffer permanent vision loss from glaucoma. He had been getting automated sight tests from an optician for years. He never thought about the difference between that an a doctor's comprehensive eye exam. Unfortunately, when he realized that he had serious vision problems, it was too late to do anything about the vision he had lost. When glaucoma takes your vision, you never get it back.
We realized that a lot of people don't think much about their eye health until its too late. We wanted to change that.
To motivate people to take their eye health seriously and to make it easier for them to seek out the proper care from a doctor of optometry and avoid the photographer's unfortunate fate we decided that we would give people complementary, custom made, prescription eye-glasses just for doing what they should do every year: get an annual eye exam from an eye doctor.
In the first year of See for Life, just under one thousand people have participated in the free prescription eye-wear offer just for taking responsibility for their health.
Many of these people were diagnosed with early stage glaucoma - early enough to stop the disease before it did permanent damage. Other people were diagnosed with diabetes, multiple sclerosis, eye movement disorders, high cholesterol and and other eye and systemic diseases.
See for Life has been a success and it continues. We look forward to helping many more people live healthy, see clearly and beat eye disease.
