COULD THIS BE YOU?
You have only worn a pair of driving glasses. No Biggie.
As you have gotten older your reading is starting to blur. All your friends use over-the-counter readers, but they don’t seem to help you. WHY?
Our patient, let’s call her Sally, believed wearing glasses all the time made her eyes weak. So, when she found the street signs not clear she purchased “distant/diving” glasses. This means she only wore the glasses when driving.
However, as time went on she noticed while reading the letters were “smudgy.” Using over-the-counter readers made it worse. She bought one reader after another until a dozen could be found throughout her home. However, nothing seemed to help. Discouraged she came to Affleck, M.D. Eye Care.
One look at her vision Rx, by Dr. Affleck, told us everything. The big bad wolf was Astigmatism.
Astigmatism is when the cornea of the eye is miss-shaped. This causes the light signal that enters the eye to scatter. When the light signal is not focused on the right spot on the retina the image is fuzzy at any distances. Using over-the-counter reading eyeglasses made it worse because their basic properties are just to magnify the image. So, when Sally used over-the-counter reading eyeglasses, the smudge was magnified.
Not everyone needs astigmatism correction and it has various degrees. In Sally’s case in order to read sharply she needs customized reading glasses with correction for astigmatism. To learn more about astigmatism visit Smart Eye
A quick side note, your eyes and brain work together to make your sight. Infrequent wearing of corrective lenses can cause eye strain and difficulty adapting to new corrective lenses.