Ringing in the New Year

It's been an exciting (and quickly growing!) year with Eyedolatry, and I just wanted to thank all my regular readers, and those who stumbled upon this blog just wondering what was wrong with their eye. Reading your comments and the search key words that brought you to my blog has been so enlightening and inspiring!  For all of my fellow optometrists (or optometry students) reading this blog, you may be surprised by the topics that most people are searching for.  Here's a review of the most popular search topics from Eyedolatry in 2013:

• Conjunctival Cyst -- That's right, out of all the life and vision threatening conditions that most optometrists would suspect patients are concerned about, conjunctival cyst is the most common medical search word bringing patients to the blog.  In fact, conjunctival cyst, and conjunctival cyst treatment are 2 of the top 10 most frequently searched entries!  Am I the only one that finds this amazing?
• Dailies Total 1 -- Since Ciba launched its revolutionary new water gradient lens material, this contact lens has been a consistent source of inquiry.  In fact, it has surpassed NBA Glasses as my most popular all time post.  People want to know what makes these lenses different, and what exactly are they going to cost them.  Bausch and Lomb's Biotrue One Day was the second most popular contact lens related post of the year.  It is great to see more people interested in dailies, and I hope that trend continues.  Currently only about 12% of Americans are enjoying the advantages of single use contact lenses. I would love for us to see Americans being fit in the safer, healthier, and more comfortable daily modality at the rate that Japan and European countries currently achieve (reported at around 40%)!
• Contact Lens Health and Safety -- Another popular search item is contact lens wear complications.  You don't know how many times I see "Can I sleep in Acuvue 2" pop up in my search item history report.  I am so glad that patients want to ask this, but I am guessing since Acuvue 2 is such an old contact lens (launched by Vistakon in 1999), that patients are searching this because they have been doing it for years, and are just now being told not to.  I wish there was a way I could contact Google and when someone typed that into a search engine, it would just give them an immediate pop-up answer, of "Please, please don't.  Your eye doctor begs you not to."  Congratulations to all those people though who are rethinking the amount of abuse their corneas have been taking for the last 14 years!  
• Enchroma Color Blindness App -- This was a huge surprise to me.  When I first posted about the Enchroma App I figured it would generate basically no interest (that's what I assume about most of my post topics haha).  But people are searching for color blindness testing at a surprising rate.  Maybe its just a fun thing to test out while you are sitting at home watching TV, but I may start pulling out my Ishihara plates more frequently in the exam room.
• Concussions and the Eye -- This is a topic near and dear to my heart, and if you are one of the thousands of people that have clicked on my post about the side effects of concussions, I encourage you to also click over to my colleague's website, See to Play.  Dr. Peters is the optometrist to the Carolina Hurricanes hockey team, and routinely posts about concussion rehabilitation.