Microscope Issues- My eyes feel like they are burning

[PathologyRocks]

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Hey All,

So being in my intern year, I am constantly looking through the microscope that our program provides for us as residents. It is a fairly traditional scope. At the end of the day, my eyes feel like they are burning. However, after signing out with attendings, my eyes dont feel that way at all. I think it has to do with the light source. The bulb is a traditional incandescent in my microscope, but I think theirs is an LED.

Has anyone else experienced this?

Can LED's be put in older microscopes? I am willing to spend some money to buy a new microscope but Im not sure where to start. I feel like I would want to look under the microscope more if this wasnt an issue. Thanks for your help

-P

 

[MirkoCrocop]

Good ol' fashioned H2S lining the oculars -- we do it to all the noobs

welcome to path!

 

[KCShaw]

Blink more. Really, I think people manage their eyes and their scope time differently when alone vs with an attending. It's much easier to catch yourself staring at one spot or one slide for an extended period when alone, as attendings tend to be a little more rapid with their viewing and moving on to the next slide (which is accompanied by a few moments away from the scope). Dunno about "burning" per se, but either dry or watery eyes seemed like a common ailment. Motion sickness was the worst, but that one is usually more associated -with- an attending or other person driving -- we had one attending famous for making people sick, evidently due to some combination of their angled dual-viewing setup and their tendency to unexpectedly jump or randomly meander around on the slide.

 

[dsoz]

At the risk of telling you something that you should have learned in bio101...

Too much light??? Do you adjust the iris diaphragm to decrease/increase the light as needed?

Lower power objectives don't need as much light, higher powers need more light because the aperture of the objective is smaller.
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When I did a lot of microscope work I found that when I frequently adjusted the iris diaphragm not only did I see more detail, but my eyes did not hurt so much at the end of the day.


dsoz<o></o>

 

[yaah]

Yeah, is the light too bright? Try turning it down and seeing how it changes.

 

[sirenomelia]

Sometimes you may not notice the eyepeice objectives are out of focus with each other and this can make you dizzy or cause eyestrain. Usually one is adjustable. Put up a slide on 10x, close your eye with the adjustable eyepeice and focus the open eye. Then switch eyes and focus the open eye using the eyepeice adjustment. I have to do this everytime i go into our multihead library. I swear the derm people that always use our room must have let Sloth from the Goonies into their program and he's using that scope.

 

[KCShaw]

Always liked the LED's, though a good quality, clean, and properly adjusted scope with any quality light source works well for me personally. The rumor going around during residency was that LED's weren't being promoted much because the bulbs essentially never need to be replaced, thus eating into some of the recurring income of some companies for new bulbs. I seem to recall there were only 1 or 2 LED based scopes around our department during residency. But if I were to buy my own it would be hard to overlook an LED source, in a quality scope.