What To Do If You Have Sudden Vision Loss in One Eye

If you suddenly lose sight in one eye for no apparent reason, there’s an major chance that one of the small blood vessels supplying your retina has become blocked. The retina is the sensitive backside of the interior eye onto which light is focused. If one of the small arteries supplying the area becomes blocked, you'll lose vision almost instantly. You only have about an hour to fix the problem before irreversible damage occurs.

If you can get to an emergency room, that’s probably the best option but this is assuming a doctor will see you in time and assuming they know what to do. You can easily perform the same procedure a doctor would perform with no difficulty.

To move the foreign material that’s blocking the retinal artery, you need to rapidly increase the blood pressure flowing through the retina. The easiest way to do this is to firmly press your fingertips over the closed eye until you feel pain, then quickly release the pressure. As you apply pressure to the eye, the fluid within the eye collapses the retinal blood vessels, building up blood pressure. Upon release, the blood quickly surges through the small arteries and will dislodge the clot. It should then move further downstream into a narrower artery—improving the chances that only a smaller part of the retina will be harmed.

This technique generally restores almost all the lost vision immediately—and will be the same procedure utilized if you’re seen in the emergency room. (Lancet 07;370(9587):590) The event is an indication that there is an active clotting problem, so you should follow up with the use of the natural clot buster nattokinase, and taking the other necessary steps to reduce the formation of atherosclerosis throughout the body.