Optimizing Your Vision

Unless you are one of the rare few that never needed glasses or contacts chances are you will need some sort of vision correction to optimize your vision. Luckily, we live in a day and age where technological advances allow for glasses and contacts to be worn comfortably and where refractive surgery is an option.

In essence, eyeballs are perfectly rounded spheres that allow us to focus on objects both close and far away. However, not everyone’s eyeballs have developed into perfectly formed spheres. A developmental error of even the smallest fraction of a millimeter can affect a person’s vision. These tiniest of flaws result in a person being nearsighted, farsighted, or having astigmatism. In order to optimize your vision you may need glasses or contacts.

Nearsightedness
If you can read a book or work at a computer for hours and see with ease but need glasses to focus on objects far away you likely have nearsightedness. Myopia, also known as nearsightedness, affects about 25% of the population. Distant objects appear fuzzy and out of focus but objects up close are easy to focus on. There can be several causes for myopia, such as the shape of your cornea, having a longer eyeball than normal (yes that can really happen), and the placement and shape of your eye’s lens. These slight errors make objects appear in front of your retina rather than on, so a blurred image is sent to the brain.

Farsightedness
Are you squinting to read this right now? Does reading give you a headache from squinting and trying to focus? If objects look blurry up close but distant objects, like road signs, aren’t a problem to focus on then you may have farsightedness. Hyperopia, also known as farsightedness, affects about 10% of the population. The causes of hyperopia are similar to those of myopia, where the shape of the cornea, the placement and shape of your eye’s lens, and a shorter than usual eyeball are all causes.

Presbyopia
Sorry, nothing lasts forever, not the Grateful Dead, not Elvis, not summer, and not your perfect vision. Presbyopia is the loss of perfect vision with age. When we are younger our eye’s lenses are able to change shape to account for objects that are close to the eye. Over time the ciliary body inside our eyes begins to lose its ability to contract. The result is that the lens becomes thicker and more rigid. This is why many elderly people have to hold newspapers and books far away in order to read: time for glasses.

Astigmatism
A normal cornea is in the shape of a partial sphere where all directions are equally curved. For some people the angles of the cornea or lens may be steeper than others. This doesn’t allow for images to fall on the retina so these images are seen by the brain as blurry.

If any of these conditions sound like something that is bothering you then you definitely want to set up an appointment for an eye exam. Contact Vision Pro to set up  an appointment and see the world with perfect vision!