Golf Eye Care
Seeing the Green for the Trees
Eye Care on the Golf Course

For women golfers who are required to wear prescription lenses or need to take care of protecting your eyes from UV light, we want to help you understand the options available along with the best advice on eye care for the golf course.

Most of us wear some kind of eye wear, whether it’s glasses, contact lenses or sunglasses. In some cases you need to wear prescription lenses to correct your vision, in others it can be to reduce glare or for cosmetic reasons. It is important that you find the right kind of eye wear to suit your needs on the golf course.

Prescription Glasses

Women golfers may find prescription glasses become a hassle on the course as they:

• Can produce distracting reflections;
• Easily fall off during your golf swing or when your bending down to putt;
• Can become dirty or fogged; and
• Have a limited field of vision as they don’t correct your peripheral vision.

There are other alternatives available. If however, you want to stick with your glasses, you can help them to stay on with sports cords and spectacle chains. You can also get clip on sunglass lenses to reduce glare and reflections, although you may need to make sure these are stable during your swing or putt.

Contact Lenses

Contact lenses improve on eyeglasses for golfers, not only in the peripheral visual field but also in the overall quality of vision. Many women golfers note that when they wear their contact lenses while playing golf, they can see subtle breaks in the green that were not appreciable before with their normal prescription glasses.

You also don’t need to worry about contact lenses falling off during your swing or when you’re bending over your putter. As with everything in sports, Nike have also been innovative in the area of contact lenses. You can now get sport-tinted contact lenses (Nike MAXSIGHT™) which is a soft contact lens available in two glare-reducing tints.

The one drawback of contact lenses is for those women golfers who also have allergies. The allergens can adhere to the lens surface and exaggerate their symptoms.

Sunglasses

If you are looking for sunglasses in general or as a golfer, there are several buying musts that you should consider:

• The lenses should provide 100% UVA and UVB protection;
• You should consider wraparound frames that protect your eyes completely from the harmful UV rays;
• Look for polarized lenses as they limit the rays of light that pass through the lens. This virtually eliminates glare allowing your eyes to relax and making it easier to track the ball in flight; and
• Whether it's normal glasses or sunglasses that you choose, when you are wearing them for golf, you need to think of getting polycarbonate lenses – just in case you are one of the unfortunate golfers who are struck in the eye by a golf ball. (Yes it happens frequently enough to have professional advice attached to it!)

Should you choose not to go for the wraparound style of sunglasses then you will need to apply a sensitive sun-protection lotion to your eyelids. This is to protect them from Skin Cancer; it should be at least SPF 15.

Emergency Eye Care Procedures

Struck in the Eye with Golf Ball	Foreign Objects in Your Eye
If you should be one of these unlucky statistics (sometimes it's even our own ball), you should follow these procedures: Apply ice to the eye with as little pressure as possible; and Seek immediate medical attention to determine if there has been serious injury to the cornea, retina, or optic nerve.	It could be sand from the bunker or a bug that crossed your path, if you do get a foreign object in your eye on the golf course, you should: Flood the eye with water, or lubricating eye drops. If there is no water available, simply close your eye and allow the tears that are naturally produced to irrigate your eye area and flush out the foreign matter.
Please note: We are not physicians or affiliated with any medical or pharmaceutical association. Please consult with your physician before applying any medical treatment.

Although it may not be a medical emergency, coping with allergies or dry eyes on the golf course can handicap your game. If it is allergies that are causing your eyes to well up or become so itchy it’s driving you crazy, you can look at taking an antihistamine or using a topical medication like eye drops.

If on the other hand you have those same teary eyes when the weather is cold or windy – you are probably and ironically suffering from dry eye. The best way to treat dry eye is to use lubricating eye drops regularly during the day, as this helps to provide the moisture that the eye needs.

Whatever your eye care needs, there are as with anything either to do with women or women golfers - extensive ranges of options available. Perhaps you want those top-end golf sunglasses or require sports contact lenses. You can even get special glasses that help you to see the ball lying in the grass, even if it may make you look a little like a radioactive scientist. What’s most important is that you take care of your eyes in relation to both sun damage and any other irritants on the golf course.