Treating Presbyopia with Corrective Lens. The Goods and the Bads

Presbyopia affects about 90 millions Americans.

Corrective lens is the most popular call of treatment for this vision disorder.

This article aims to share with you the different kinds of corrective lens that is commonly used in treating presbyopia and the danger of this corrective method.

A man went to an eye specialist to get his eyes tested and asked,
“Doctor, will I be able to read after wearing glasses?”
“Yes, of course,” said the doctor, “why not!”
“Oh! How nice it would be,” said the patient with joy, “I have been illiterate for so long.”

Glasses

Traditionally, for people without nearsightedness, presbyopia has been treated with using reading glasses. It is typically used for close-up work such as reading, sewing and writing.

Reading glasses are plus lens which work like that magnifying lens.

They helps to zoom in on the close fine prints so that you can see the details. You can easily purchase reading glasses from drug stores and spectacles retails stores.

For people who have nearsightedness, they will need bifocal lenses or progressive additional lens (PAL).

Bifocal lenses have two different points of focus.

The upper part of the eyeglass lens is set for distance viewing, while a relatively small portion of the lower lens has a prescription set for seeing close work.

There are trifocal lenses for serious presbyopes who needed three range of vision - far, intermediate and close.

PAL is similar to bifocal and trifocal but it offers more gradual transition between the different prescriptions and there is no visible line of division.

It is currently the most popular multifocal lens as it reduces nauseous from abrupt change in view and it looks better.

But the cost is hideous too. I almost fainted when my mum told me sheepishly that her PAL glasses cost her around $1000.... Crazy stuff..

Contact Lens

Some presbyopes will opt for contact lens.

Currently there are two styles.

One by is using multifocal contact lenses which comes in soft or rigid gas permeable versions and work similarly to PAL for glasses.

The other is through monovision, in which you wear a lens for seeing far in one eye and a lens for near vision in the other.

Even though the brain will learn to favor the eyes for different tasks, some people complain of reduced visual acuity with monovision.

However, by now, I am sure that the intelligent you would realized that corrective lens approach is actually treating the symptom of presbyopia rather than the cause.

All corrective lens did was to refract the rays of light inwards and bringing the light into focus onto the retina.

Nothing fundamental about our eyes have changed.

It is like taking pain killer to think that you are fine when in fact, you are not. Plus it fatigues your eyes and worsen your condition.

There are also risk of contact lens to be considered. Read more about them here.

Pros: Instant effect, can be cheap (if using reading glasses), look smart(?)
Cons: Inconvenient, uncomfortable, can be expensive, presbyopia progression

Regain Your Eyesight Now

In order to reverse the damage, we must start removing those corrective lens now.

Use them only on times where it is absolutely necessary.

Times where you have to handle dangerous machinery, shooting, driving, checking out your dating partner... you get the idea.

In addition, like all muscles, we have to do some rehabilitation work to regain our strength.

There is where eye exercises come in.

Eye exercises are a set of activities that aim to strengthen your eye muscles and increase their flexibility.

These in turn helps you to increase eyesight and slows down eye deterioration.

Try out some of the free exercises in the following links:

• Eye yoga exercises
• Eye strengthening exercises using only pencil

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