Here’s Looking at You
The pandemic has definitely changed the way we live and it has also taken away a lot of the things that we have taken for granted our entire lives.
A thought came to me early on in the mask-wearing, as I looked over at the mom of a patient. Her child was about to get his braces off and I wanted her approval that she was happy with our final result. The thought was, “Wow, with most of the face covered, how would I do my normal facial evaluation of the mom’s facial expression to determine if she was truly happy with the result or just saying she was in order to get the braces off?!"
In a few days, the answer began to emerge…
Much to my surprise, the answer had always been there. In fact, I had always been using it (subconsciously) as part of my determination of mom’s, dad’s, and/or patient’s approval of their smile…
It is true, masks do cover the bottom half of our faces. But they don’t cover what is considered to be our most attractive facial feature and our second-most complex body part (after our brain). Weighing in at .25 ounces apiece… with only 1/6 exposed to our outside world… and thought to be the windows of our soul…. masks do not cover our eyes!
Over the past year, therefore, I have had to zero in on my patients’ eyes to fully appreciate what kind of day they are having or how the parents feel treatment is going. The hardest situation I feel is meeting new patients and parents and trying to get a take on how their orthodontic exam is going. Some parents (and some patients for that matter) really want to know the biology behind their treatment. And, as you can guess, some just want to get going so they can be done. To make it a good first visit to the orthodontist, I need to determine as quickly as possible which type of parent/patient I have in the chair!
You know, you only get one chance to make a good first impression.
They say 93% of human communication is non-verbal. I have to feel that eyes make up a good portion of that percentage. Just this week (which really helped me decide on today’s topic), I was asking a mom if her son had been wearing his elastics, as he needed to, to get done. She said of course! I looked into her eyes and held my stare longer than normal. I could actually see, she was covering for him. After a couple of seconds, I said maybe he needs to wear them more often, and she sheepishly agreed. I told her not to play poker. She said she was a bad truth stretcher…
How many times, when you were growing up, did your mother tell you, “Look me in the eyes and tell me you didn’t do it.”
I’m sure a lot of you have developed a better ability to read people, especially your kids, through their non-verbal eye language.
Eyes are truly amazing in their ability to translate our world into an understandable and enjoyable story called life. Our memories of our life’s journey, experts say, are 80% determined by what we see.
Eyes have many interesting biological facts associated with them. I will leave you with a couple I found intriguing:
The average person blinks 4,200,000 times a year and it is impossible to sneeze with your eyes open. A fingerprint has 40 unique traits, whereas eyes have 256, making retina scans the best of our current biological “John Hancock’s”. Eyelashes have a lifespan of 5 months and if you lined up all eyelashes shed by the average human in our average 76-year life span, it would measure 98 feet!
Though we take them for granted (and we don’t protect them from the elements, especially sunlight, like we should), our eyes are very important in our daily lives… from translating our world to forming or maintaining relationships.
Eyes have even made it to Hollywood, with arguably one of the best-known lines ever spoken on film, Bogart to Bergman in the 1942 film, Casablanca, “Here’s looking at you, kid.”
This weekend, let your eyes take you on a walk around Medina Square… or a journey on one of our local nature trails… or a deep gaze of a culinary delicacy from one of our local chefs.
Have a great weekend Medina County, and take this weekend to look at the world around you (and into the eyes of the people around you).
Here’s looking at you,
- Dr. Pfister