The eye care medical field has an unusual split between two different types of insurance for covering eye issues: health insurance and vision insurance. Not all patients have both.

In most cases, your health insurance is used to cover medical and surgical eye problems but not routine exams or the cost of contacts or glasses. Those things are often covered by separate vision insurance.

Why the difference? Originally, health insurance was created to take care of health “problems” and wasn’t designed to cover “routine,” “screening,” or “wellness” exams.

Since health insurance wasn’t going to cover “routine” eye exams, the vision insurance industry arose to help insure/cover those routine exams as well as the costs of glasses and/or contacts if they were needed.

That dichotomy now often causes great confusion when you make an appointment at your eye doctor. When making your appointment, the office is going to need to know which insurance, if you have both, you are going to be using for...

There is a common misconception that any adverse reaction to a drug is an allergy. That is definitely not the case.

Reporting to your doctors that you have an allergy to a medication when what you really had was a side effect could potentially create a substantial alteration to your medical care in the future. And this could mean a physician might avoid using a drug that could possibly save your life because of the fear of an allergic reaction.

An anaphylactic allergic reaction generally produces a very specific set of symptoms, including difficulty breathing due to constriction of windpipe, swelling of your tongue, and/or a rash and hives that break out over your body. While an allergic reaction can present in other ways, these are the most frequent reactions that occur when you have a true allergy to something.

If that is not the type of reaction you had then it probably isn’t an allergy. If you are uncertain if your reaction to a medication is an allergy or not, testing by an...