Bad news is a matter of context. But think about this: how many people do you know who ever got better after they went to the temple of the 20/20 worship?
The thing is, what you are being told by the optometrist, the whole story about 20/20, is a fairly gigantic fallacy when it comes to the realities of your eyesight.
Yes, sure. You can get glasses to let you see 20/20. Or 20/10. Or 20/8. But … is that good for you?
If you want to drive a car safely, you do need something around 20/30 vision. But what when you aren’t driving a car? What if yo are safely sitting on the couch, a book 20 centimeters from your face? Do you then still need glasses that would in theory let you see tiny print on a chart in a dark room at the optometrist office?
Sometimes I think that if all of medicine adopted this way of thinking, we would all live in plastic bubbles, in sterilized rooms, in permanent casts, hooked up to antibiotic drips. Because, if we can eradicate all possible symptoms for all possible scenarios, why not?
All of this is just idle speculation, till you end up with high myopia eventually, depressed, with sleep problems, difficulty concentrating, and maybe a diagnosis of lattice degeneration (and increased risk of blindness).
Glasses massively increase your risk for all those things. And all you get in return is covering up of a symptom. If the optometrist would tell you about this trade-off, I wouldn’t be opposed to the way glasses are prescribed. It’s just that they don’t tell you these things. That’s where I have a problem, and that’s why I spend hours of my free time volunteering here. It’s not ok to prescribe you things that hurt your long term health, without making you aware of that fact.
Understand glasses. They change where light focuses in your eye. If you are working to either prevent more myopia, or reversing it, take a look at what I just discussed with Sasha in the forum:
Wanted to report that apparently i gained another centimeter or so, giving me 34/28 today. This is -3/-3.5; the self-measured starting point in January being -3.5/-4.5.
i haven’t measured in a month and this month has been very chaotic, with travel and basically no explicit focus on vision improvement apart from avoiding the “bad stuff”. still i have gained 1-2 centimeters since the last measurement in March. what triggered me to measure was the observation that apparently I can stay further away from the laptop screen and still see stuff. and also that it is becoming harder and harder for me to remember which one was the “good” and which the “bad” eye (initially one eye saw MUCH less than the other).
due to travel and otherwise being absorbed i have done very little active focus, apart from the fact that i am wearing -2 glasses so sometimes i have to push to survive (e.g. read a timetable in the station). the other practice is staying as far away as possible from the laptop. this is not too hard yet as my ergonomical distance (having the thing on my lap) seems to be around 30-40 cm. however, i feel that i am getting to the edge where this is going to be too close and i will have to make some other screen arrangement.
I am quite happy to see this, as i remember when i tried to work on the laptop without glasses for the first time, i found it close to impossible and very straining while now it’s not a problem.
The progress seems slow though now compared to the beginning. i also wonder if my radical idea of using -2 glasses is holding me back as i don’t get sharpness on distant objects in them obviously (just on a radius of a few meters). this bothers me a bit as i am in a country i like, it’s spring, so i’d like to occasionally see stuff like observing people in the street etc. (as opposed to not really caring being stuck in some hole in winter). i assume though that going back to a stronger prescription now to pull focus on distant objects does not make much sense now, and i will better stick it out with the -2 as long as there is still some slow progress? or am i wrong?
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Here is what I told Sasha, which might also matter to you:
The prescription strength, per se, doesn’t really matter.
What does matter is having a definite blur horizon challenge up close, and the same for distance. So for your distance prescription, changing the numbers just dials the distance up or down. Aside from that, there is really not much effect on your eyesight improvement.
Here’s what to look at:
If your distance prescription is stronger, gives you a further distance before blur, then you get less opportunity to challenge yourself on closer objects. If you get less opportunity for challenge, you might do it less, and you could get less stimulus, and slower improvement.
If your distance prescription is too strong, ie. there is too much sharpness in your primary viewing distance, you could get myopia inducing stimulus from the focal plane.
A happy medium is often something around 20/40 for the primary light intensity and with a bit of focus pushing (not for everybody, just as a reference).
You’ll only improve by about 1 diopter a year after you get through the whole lot of the initial improvement round. Generally after the first year, if you really were on top of it (20-30% improvement), things slow down to the diopter a year progression. Considering that, there is only so much stimulus work you can do, before it doesn’t really make much difference (it takes the eye itself time to respond to stimulus, as does your brain).
I hope this helps!”
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For the whole thread, if you’d like to comment, visit here.
Glasses are risky business. You need them to compensate for close-up time. I wear glasses in my picture. They are plus lenses which I use every day. If I don’t, I start getting pseudo myopia from all the screen time I spend help here on the site. You can wear glasses for prevention, or you can wear glasses like a rug under which you sweep your eye strain. One of these choices might end better than the other.
Quick what’s the furthest away you can read right now, outside? Get out of here, away from this screen, look at the real world! ;-)
– Neha
