Your eyes are one of the essential parts of your body that you use daily especially when practicing dentistry. That is why you need to always take care of it. One way of taking care of your eyes is using the right magnification optical aid when performing dental procedures like the dental loupes.

How can dental loupes help you take care of your eyes?

Your work as a dentist involves dealing with the teeth, the surrounding tissues, and the set of gums which we all know are located inside the mouth. The bad thing about being a dentist is that you need to deal with a darker work area and with smaller objects.

When performing dental procedures (even the simplest ones like routine check up, tooth extraction, and cleaning) with your bare eyes, you normally need to stay closer to the mouth of your patient in order for you to have a better access to the oral cavity. Staying closer to your patient's mouth basically requires you to bend forward and stay in such position all throughout the duration of the procedure or as long as you needed to which can lead to poor posture, occupational illnesses, and muscular pains like neck stress, shoulder fatigue, and backache. Not only that, you also need to force your eyes to see the object that you are working on which can result in eye fatigue or eye strain and headache.

Do I need to use a dental headlight?

Most of the time, having just the dental loupe for dentists is not enough to deliver the highest quality dental services and to get rid of misdiagnosis, occupational illness, and eye strain. You also need to have the right amount, quality, and consistency of light in order to enhance your visual acuity and to make it easier for you to clearly see every corner of the oral cavity as well as to identify the real color of the teeth and the gums of your patients.

Picking the right type of dental loupe

Dental loupes come in different styles, quality, magnification, working distance, designs, resolution, and field of view. In order to get the full benefits that dental magnification loupes offer, you should choose the one that perfectly fits you.

You can pick a pair of loupes with customized working distance, the field of view, and the pupillary distance to make sure it suits you well. You can also add prescription lens when you needed to. The style, the color of the frame, and the design typically depend on your personal preference.

As for the type, there are two basic types of loupes available in the market today, the through the lens loupe or TTL and the flip up. Although these two types of dental loupes offer almost the same benefits, they also differ in some ways most especially in terms of price, the field of view, weight, comfort, convenience, and design.

When it comes to the quality of the lens, you need to consider factors like the resolution, spherical aberration, and chromatic aberration. These factors can also be based on your personal preference.

If it is your first time to use a dental loupe, a 2.5x magnification is a good starting point. This magnification is also ideal for general dental procedures. Higher magnification levels are useful for more intricate dental procedures.