Guide Dogs And Aging

Aging has its plus points, like having more experience, having family and often having fewer financial concerns, but it also brings other problems with it too, normally health worries. One of the health worries that older individuals worry about is their eyesight.

Most people like to remain independent, but blindness causes you to become dependent, especially if you go blind while you are older. At least while you are younger, you have a long time to learn how to cope with it.

There are a number of ways that you can lose your sight when you get older but one that effects 10% of those over 65 and 30% of those over 75 years is macular degeneration. It is often referred to as age-related macular degeneration, ARMD or only AMD because it tends to affect those individuals who are over 50 years of age.

However, macular degeneration just affects the centre 2.1% of your field of vision, so it is very rare for ARMD to become the cause of complete blindness. The problem is that that 2.1%, centre field of vision is highly important for recognizing individuals and for reading.

So what can you do about it, if you get ARMD? One option would be to get a guide dog, a 'blind dog', as they say in the UK or a 'seeing eye dog' as they say in America. A guide dog will help prevent you from bumping into objects, which you might well do if you lose your central field of vision.

Most registered blind individuals are not totally blind. Some are worse off than others but sufferers of ARMD usually retain 97.9% of their field of vision, which is the peripheral vision. A guide dog would cover the remainder for you.

Guide dogs are taught as puppies so they will remain with their blind friends for seven or eight years or more This allows the dog and the owner to build up a wonderful relationship, as all individuals do with their dogs. However, the rapport of a blind person with a guide dog though is extra-ordinary. The dog knows that it is being relied upon for its master' safety.

If you decide to go down the road of getting a guide dog, the best place to start is your national association for the blind, the address of which you can find either at your GP's, in Yellow Pages or on the Net. Some countries' organizations will charge you for providing a guide dog and others will subsidize your acquiring a guide dog and its training.

It would be a great idea to order a guide dog as soon as you are diagnosed with a disease that threatens your eyesight because that will give you more time to get to know and pick a puppy as your future companion.

If you are lucky and your GP saves your eyesight, you have lost nothing and you have acquired a wonderful, intelligent friend, but if the worst comes to the worst, you will have an invaluable, seeing, protective, wonderful, intelligent friend. You cannot lose.

Owen Jones, the writer of this article, writes on several topics, and is now concerned with wet macular degeneration treatment. If you want to know more, please visit our web site at Macular Degenerative Disease