I had a patient come in today, a 33 year old helicopter pilot who requested a color vision test as part of his eye exam. We don’t normally do color vision testing, mainly because even if you detect it, there’s nothing effective that can be done about it.
But since he requested it, I pulled out the Ishihara Pseudoisochromatic Plates and tested each eye. You may have seen it…hidden numbers in a series of multi-colored dots. And sure enough, he got every one of them wrong, even though all other test findings were normal. I asked him if he ever had trouble matching clothes, etc. and he said no.
He mentioned that he had passed his FAA flight testing that involved color vision just 5 years earlier…so either the tester at that time didn’t know what they were doing or he has “acquired” a color vision deficiency, which is relatively rare. So I’ve been doing some research on acquired color vision problems and I’m going to contact him with a few more questions.
By the way, while he was checking out up front, his wife mentioned that indeed he did have trouble distinguishing colors. She took quite a bit of satisfaction in me telling her that she had probably been right all along, even though she conceded defeat each time in their arguments.
In the meantime, I found a pretty cool blog about color vision, which has some very good color vision tests that you can do yourself online (on the right side of the page). Check out http://www.colblindor.com/coblis-color-blindness-simulator/ to test your own color vision and to observe how a color blind person sees the world.
Stay tuned to see if I find out more with this patient. If any of my OD friends have any suggestions, please let me know. And have a great weekend!
