In the top three questions I get consistently, is definitely some variation of, “how strong should my glasses be”.

How much should I get, Jake?  HOW MUCH!!  TELL ME RIGHT F%#@IN MEOW!!!

To more easily answer this question, this very blog post.  If you find yourself here because I just sent you this link as reply to an e-mail you sent me, you’re in the right place.  Find the answer the “how much diopter” question, here.  Ready?

Your first question should not be about diopters at all.

Young grasshopper.  Diopters and how many of them is something that should be fairly obvious, when you’re ready for that actual question.  

Before you get to that question, you should have learned about how your eye works, how myopia happens, how your minus lenses contributed to that myopia.  You should have learned how diopter relates to centimeter distance and how the single prescription paradigm does you no favors.

Find all those answers, first.

You probably should be spending a good few days (at the very least), getting a hang of the basics, before thinking about diopters.

And the way you will know whether you’re ready, is by being able to answer the diopter question for yourself.  Perhaps you won’t get it perfectly right, maybe you’ll not be sure about some details.  Maybe astigmatism will have you stumped, but then you’ll search the blog (or use Google and use endmyopia as part of your search string) and find answers.

Not good enough of an answer?

I do answer case specific questions, but only in the support forum, and only as part of BackTo20/20.  In those cases it’s worth my time because I know those students are committed, I know they’re reading the sessions they’re supposed to, and from the log system I can see their current centimeter entries.  I’m reasonably assured that a student won’t take my advice out of context and walk blindly in front of traffic (also, no medical advice, no prescription advice, etc etc).

And yes, for the you’re-all-about-the-money-Jake contingent.  Students contribute to the all important Jake yacht fuel fund.  How would it look, an eye guru marooned onshore in Monaco, well past season?  Imagine the gossip.

At this point if you skimmed this article and still think, “but wtf Jake, how many diopters do I need?!”, then watch this explainer video:

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That’s a guru hoodie.

Hopefully this is at least a little helpful.

Remember my job as eye guru is to lead you towards being empowered to know what you need. I’m not here to spoon feed everyone everything.  If you didn’t want to learn and just be “treated” (like a small child), mainstream optometry is already doing that.  Deep breaths, dive in to the whole topic, think of it as a great self exploration project.

Housekeeping:  Video volume is up, lately.  This may be temporary (though hopefully not).  I’ll be moving out of Thailand and to frontier proper, soon.  Reliability of reasonable Internet upload is a little bit in question.  

Potentially a welcome relief from looking at my face.  And if you wonder why I’d torture myself this way rather than enjoying a centrally located parkside apartment in Budapest … perhaps we’ll chat about off topic things later.  :)

Cheers,

-Jake