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Lighthouse Guild doctor offers tips to help visually impaired people walk the Monday Mile

April 5, 2017

Posted by Medical News ER

Nearly 14 million Americans – about one out of any 20 people – have low vision, according to The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Eye-care professionals use a tenure “low vision” to report poignant visible spoil that can’t be corrected with customary glasses, hit lenses, medicine or eye surgery.

According to a National Federation of The Blind, any year, 75,000 some-more people in a United States will turn blind or visually impaired. Though a condition especially afflicts a elderly, younger Americans are increasingly during risk of irrevocable prophesy loss, quite as cases of diabetes continue to rise. Low prophesy means that even with unchanging glasses, hit lenses, medicine, or surgery, people find bland tasks, such as reading, shopping, cooking, examination TV, writing, and sportive formidable to do.

Because of this difficulty, people with visible impairments mostly vaunt reduce levels of aptness than their sighted peers, mostly due to fear and miss of confidence. Walking, a elementary form of practice with many health benefits, is deliberate a good choice for people who are visually impaired, according to Laura Sperazza, OD, Director of Low Vision Services during Lighthouse Guild in New York City.

Dr. Sperazza encourages people with low vision, who have been wavering to try out and travel for fitness, to attend in a American Heart Association’s National Walking Day on Apr 5. The day promotes all a advantages of walking, and people can keep a movement going via a year by starting a Monday Mile in their community.

The Monday Mile is an beginning of The Monday Campaigns, a nonprofit open health organization, compared with Johns Hopkins, Columbia and Syracuse universities. The Monday Mile goal is to inspire people from all walks of life to travel for their health, by regulating Monday as a starting day. Research by Johns Hopkins shows that people perspective Monday as a day for a uninformed start and are some-more expected to start new healthy behaviors on a Monday, and lift them out for a rest of a week.

What are a best ways for people who are visually marred to travel a Monday Mile with confidence? Dr. Sperazza offers these tips:

•Walk during illumination hours in sequence to equivocate obstacles.
•Walk with a routinely sighted friend to assistance equivocate obstacles and variable conditions.
•Don’t travel in bad weather.
•Wear correct boots to equivocate slipping.
•Walk in informed areas so we can expect a path.
•Use a ‘sighted cane’ that notifies others that we have an impairment
•For people with a larger turn of impairment, sight in a use of a ‘sighted cane’ with a mobility specialist, that can assistance them adjust to opposite surfaces and unknown areas

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