Straight talk
We cannot look at a photograph of your eye
What you might expect to hear
“Send us a picture and we will tell you what it is.”
What is actually true
We will not tell you what is wrong with an eye from a photograph, a video call or a description, and a practice that offers to is offering you something it cannot deliver.
Why
Almost everything that separates a dull red eye from a serious one is invisible in a photograph. Whether the redness is worse around the coloured part of the eye, whether the surface takes up a stain, what the pressure is, and what the front of the eye looks like under a microscope at forty times — none of that is in a picture taken on a telephone, and the conditions that need seeing today are the ones that look ordinary in one.
What we do instead
Ring and describe it. What that gets you is not a diagnosis but a decision about where to go and how fast, which is the useful thing anybody can give you over a telephone, and which we will give you even when the answer is an emergency room rather than us.
The other eight
Straight answers to the rest of what this site will not pretend.
Ring rather than send a picture
Describe what you can see and what you cannot, and we will tell you where to go and how fast.