Does wearing eyeglasses help, hurt, or have no effect on your eyes? Someone once told me that wearing them actually made your eyesight worse since it somehow further weakened your (already weak) eye muscles and that eye exercises alone could somehow correct your vision. I don’t think that’s right. Any optomologists out there?
Eyeglasses definitely help your eyes. There are groups out there, such as the ones promoting the See Clearly Method who claim you can fix your vision problems with exercise, but they have no scientific studies to back them up.
Was that a duck quacking I just heard?
There are some vision problems caused by defects in the focusing muscles around the eye. Proper exercise can indeed strengthen these muscles, and improve your vision. But these are comparitively rare problems.
But for the more common vision problems, which are mostly caused by the shape & thickness of the cornea & lens, exercise has no effect at all. Using eyeglasses or contacts corrects this, and will improve your vision. But this has no effect on the underlying cause. That can only be actually fixed by surgical/laser/etc. intervention.
See Clearly is the first thing I thought of when I read the OP. Their radio commercials are all about eyeglasses being bad for you. Complete twaddle, of course.
It’s usually not the muscles that affect vision: the problem is the shape of the eyeball and the cornea. These can’t be changed by exercise.
Sufficient amounts of twaddle to get them sued by the AG of Iowa.
When people get old and start losing vision, weak muscles in the eye is often the root cause. (Just like all the other muscles get weak)
This is not to say lifting weights with the ciliary muscle is a replacement for glasses, and it certainly woudn’t help my astigmatism.
Not an optomologist or optometrist, but I did work as a certified and licensed optician for about 3 years a while ago.
I’ve never heard that eyeglasses can “hurt” your eyes, but I have heard people say that you become “dependent” on them. That’s basically BS. You just get used to seeing things clearly instead of blurry. You like the “new” sharp vision instead the “old” fuzzy one. So, in a way, you DO become dependent on glasses.
The Dopers that have responded stating that most vision problems are caused by the shape of the cornea (too much or too little curve) and/or the size of the eye are correct. Light isn’t being focused correctly on the retina. Astigmatism is the same type of problem, only it is caused by an “irregular” shaped cornea. It is shaped more like a football than a basketball.
When old people start to lose vision, it can usually be attributed to the onset of some amount of macular degeneration or cataracts. Exercise won’t help this at all.
As to people who are having trouble reading as they approach 40, this is a natural condition within the eye when the crystalline lens starts losing it’s flexibility and can’t flex enough to focus on near objects. It is known as presbyopia. I don’t think exercise will help in this matter either.
My late father in law bought this series of BS, which of course didn’t help him a bit. (Laser surgery did, though). Since Dad had already paid for the BS, Mr. SCL decided he’d try it and brought it home.
We’re both wearing glasses for reading.
Since the question has been answered -
Oh God, how I wish you could fix it with exercise. LASIK is still too expensive and iffy for me to consider, particularly in my case. And I positively hate my glasses but the soft contacts only ix like 99% of my vision. I’m not complaingin! But how nice it would be to have vision like my contacts all the time.
Not really.
Everyone, by the time they get to about 45 years old, loses the ability to accomodate the eye. Accomodation is a reflex that allows the eye to change focal distance, and the loss of it is called presbyopia. During accomodation, the lens thickens and the anterior surface becomes more convex due to relaxation of the ciliary muscle of the eye, thus increasing refractive power of the eye, and allowing one to focus up close (like for reading).
As people age, the lens becomes stiffer. Relaxation of the ciliary muscle doesn’t result in lens thickening, and presbyopia results. There is currently no good fix for presbyopia except reading glasses – exercises, accomodative intraocular lenses, and other things have not been shown to work.
Ooops gots that backwards my wife would kill me.
The ciliary muscle contracts, releases tension on the zonule fibers, which allows the lens to thicken.
A parallel question - so does that mean contact lenses are a no-no after the age of about 45 for most people?
No, not at all. It just means that you have to jimmy things a bit. Presbyopes can opt for monovision (where one eye is used for close vision and the other for distance – takes getting used to and lots can’t tolerate it) or another solution like bifocal contacts. Or they can just fix their regular refractive error with contacts and resort to reading glasses to deal with presbyopia.
is there an echo in here?