Guide Dogs And bad Eyesight In Aging
Aging has its plus points, like having more experience, having family and often having fewer financial concerns, but it also brings other problems with it as well, usually health worries. One of the health concerns that older individuals worry about is their eyesight.
Most people like to remain independent, but blindness makes you to become dependent, particularly if you go blind when you are older. At least when you are younger, you have a long time to learn how to deal with it.
There are several ways that you can lose your sight while you become older but one that effects 10% of those over 65 and 30% of those over 75 years is macular degeneration. It is often referred to as age-related macular degeneration, ARMD or just AMD because it tends to affect those people who are over 50 years of age.
However, macular degeneration only affects the centre 2.1% of your field of vision, so it is very rare for ARMD to become the cause of complete blindness. The difficulty is that that 2.1%, centre field of vision is highly important for recognizing people and for reading.
So what can you do about it, if you get ARMD? One choice would be to get a guide dog, a ‘blind dog’, as they say in the UK or a ‘seeing eye dog’ as they say in America. A guide dog will help prevent you from walking into objects, which you might well do if you lose your central field of vision.
Most registered blind people are not completely blind. Some are worse off than others but sufferers of ARMD usually retain 97.9% of their field of vision, which is the peripheral vision. A guide dog would cover the rest for you.
Guide dogs are taught as puppies so they will stay with their blind friends for seven or eight years or more This allows the dog and the owner to build up a wonderful relationship, as all people do with their dogs. However, the rapport of a blind person with a guide dog though is extra-special. The dog knows that it is being depended upon for its master’ safety.
If you choose to go down the road of procuring a guide dog, the best place to begin is your national association for the blind, the address of which you can find either at your physician’s, in Yellow Pages or on the Net. Some countries’ organizations will charge you for providing a guide dog and others will subsidize your acquiring a guide dog and its training.
It would be a good idea to arrange a guide dog as soon as you are diagnosed with a disease that threatens your eyesight because that will give you more time to get to know and choose a puppy as your future companion.
If you are lucky and your doctor saves your eyesight, you have lost nothing and you have gained a wonderful, intelligent friend, but if the worst comes to the worst, you will have an invaluable, seeing, protective, wonderful, intelligent friend. You cannot lose.
Owen Jones, the author of this piece, writes on a variety of topics, but is now concerned with wet macular degeneration treatment. If you want to know more, please visit our site at Macular Degenerative Disease