This is a question pertaining to myself. I have relatively light prescription for both eyes. I only wear my glasses when I absolutely need them. Now the reason I do this is to prevent my eyes from getting “used” to glasses. Is this something that would happen? Would my eyes become used to needing glasses if I wore them when I did not absolutely need to or is it genetics and whether I wear them or not my eyes will progressively worsen?
People who don’t need but don’t wear glasses fail the driver’s test.
If you “got used” to being without them, no one would have ever needed glasses to start with, would they?
make that:
People who need but don’t wear glasses fail the driver’s test.
If you “got used” to being without them, no one would have ever needed glasses to start with, would they?
Maybe. Both my brother and I started out in grade school with light prescriptions. I wore mine, he didn’t wear his. 30 years later I need glasses and he doesn’t.
I’ve never seen a study disproving your hypothesis.
I do know from personal experience that one should have a proper eye examination by an Ophthalmologist (M.D. in eyes).
When I was a kid, my parents took me to an Optician that was primarily in the business of selling glasses. He said I needed glasses, and then I needed bifocals. With my third examination, he said I needed trifocals.
My Mom got a bit suspicious and decided to take me to a Ophthalmologist to find out what was really happening with my eyes. I will never forget how the doctor took the glasses and snapped them in two. She was furious, because in her words my eyes were still developing and this was not the way to help them. She told me eventually I would need glasses, but I was to tough it out and make my eyes work. (Incidentally she only had a few frames to sell, primarily for Seniors who couldn’t get out much).
Until I reached my late 20’s I didn’t need glasses at all. Today I wear glasses only for driving, lectures, and to see distances. I don’t need them at all for any other purpose. I can see movies and television just fine without them.
When I was in 2nd grade, I started wearing glasses just for reading the blackboard at school, etc. I was told not to wear them while just walking around, or while reading, since that would only worsen my eyes by making them dependent on glasses. I followed those instructions precisely, but by the time I reached 8th grade my eyes had worsened sufficiently on their own that I had to make the transition to wearing glasses all the time. So for me, trying not to wear glasses seems not to have made any difference. 
But on a related note - briefly, in my early 20’s, my eyesight improved a bit between checkups, so that my corrected vision was actually 20/10 rather than 20/20. I loved it - everything looked so clear and crisp! - but the doctor promptly changed my prescription so that my vision would be only 20/20. According to him, wearing too strong a prescription would cause eyestrain and headaches. I’d think that wearing your light prescription glasses only when necessary would avoid those side effects as well.
A couple of thoughts related to, but not directly answering, the OP. And off the top of my head.
As I recall, a treatment in the past for amblyopia, where a child has one eye that is notably weaker than the other (also called “lazy eye”) was to put a patch over the good eye to force the lazy eye to work better. I have no idea if this was effective, or if it is still done. It did make me wonder if that wouldn’t induce the good eye to become a slacker.
Another train of thought that was around in the past regarding myopia, that typically appears in childhood and progresses over the years, was that those who wore contacts instead of glasses benefitted from the physical presence of the contact lense retarding the deformation of the eyeball, thus retarding the progression of the myopia. Once again, just off the top of my head.
I wore the same prescription for over 10 years. My corrected vision at the end of 10 years was 20/15, so my vision didn’t get worse :). My new glasses were just barely different, giving me 20/10 corrected vision.
Anyway, I’m nearsighted with medium-strength glasses, and wearing them hasn’t changed my vision at all in over 10 years. Of course, maybe my vision would have improved if I hadn’t worn glasses- ???
Arjuna34
More anecdotal evidence: My daughter was diagnosed with a lazy eye when she was 5. While both eyes needed corrective lenses, her right eye needed a less strong prescription. Because it was easier to see through that eye, she had started relying on it exclusively. Because we caught it early, we were able to treat it by simply giving her glasses which corrected her vision rather than use the eye patch. The theory was that, with her vision corrected in the “lazy” eye, she would start using both eyes equally. It worked. After a year of wearing the glasses, the vision in her left eye had improved and she was using both eyes equally.
She is now wearing bifocals because the area in which she could focus for reading had become extremely forshortened. Correcting both her far and near vision should correct this. I don’t know if she’ll ever be able to give up the bifocals, but she has stopped reading with the book 8 inches from her face.
Unless you are outside the US or regulations have changed drastically since then, you were seeing an optometrist, not an optician. An optometrist can prescribe glasses. An optician can only dispense them. (It’s kind of like the difference between an M.D. and a pharmacist.) An opthamologist is also able to prescibe glasses, but is primarily a specialist who can treat diseases and disorders of the eye, do surgery, etc. It is unnecessary to see an opthamologist for vision correction; if you are examined by a competent optometrist, (s)he will alert you if there’s something wrong with your eyes and you need to see a specialist.
I can’t speak to your specific condition 'cause you didn’t give much detail, and it’s my husband who’s the optician, not me, but prescribing trifocals for a kid seems really odd. However, like any group of professionals, eye care providers have different philosphies. I went to a guy for a while who kept urging me to get reading glasses. I took him up on it, 'cause, like I said, my hubby is an optician and he could score me some free ones. All they ever did was give me a headache from switching back and forth between presciptions so I quit using them. No other optometrist before or since has recommended reading glasses to me, but it was some kind of a fetish with this guy. By the way, he was paid by the patient, not by the presciption, so he wasn’t doing it just to make money.
(Note optician, optometrist and opthamologist are simply job titles, and shouldn’t be capitalized, just like it’s teacher and policeman, not Teacher and Policeman.)
Regarding the OP, people’s vision tends to degrade with time. Poor eyesight is caused by mishapen lenses on your eyes, and the stiffening of the lens as you get older. Neither of these problems can be improved by trying to focus without glasses, and squinting all the time causes eyestrain and headaches, not to mention unsightly wrinkles. Maybe if you have a very mild correction, you can get by without glasses. Maybe if you had gone without glasses, your eyes would degrade slower–but if you are destined to have bad eyesight, you’d only be delaying the inevitable.
Please note that poor eyesight and lazy eye are totally different things.
Interesting article in New Scientist six or seven years back about the effects of excercise on nearsightedness. Some group had discovered a very clear correlation between the amount of distance focussing a person did and the incidence of near sightedness. They found that people who regularly focused on distant objects (open-sight shooters, mountain climbers etc) had almosy zero incidence of near sightedness, and no degeneration. Similarly those that focusssed almost exclusively on nearby objects had a very high incidence and significant rapid degeneration. The theory was that the muscles used to focus the eye atrophied through disuse, and grew in resonse to use, leading to the results.
Whether wearing glasses to help the eye focus would affetc this I don’t know, but it seems likely.
I don’t know if this make sense. The muscle that is in charge of focusing (the ciliary muscle) contracts when we focus on nearby objects and relaxes when we focus on distant ones. So people who focus almost exclusively on very distant objects “exercise” their ciliary muscle less than people who focus mostly on nearby objects. If the ciliary muscle atrophied with disuse, then “distant-focusers” would suffer from degeneration more than the “near-focusers”.
I did find an article at the New Scientist’s Last Word column (It’s like a stuffy Straight Dope, where Cecil is replaced by several dozen scientists who hem and haw at each other. And no cool MB) that attempts to explain the phenomenon you described, Gaspode.
The article also mentions that animals raised in captivity to tend to get myopic too. There is still some debate as to how much myopia can be “induced” by environments where a great deal of near-focusing is necessary.
[QUOTE]
*Originally posted by Alphagene *
**I don’t know if this make sense. The muscle that is in charge of focusing (the ciliary muscle) contracts when we focus on nearby objects and relaxes when we focus on distant ones. So people who focus almost exclusively on very distant objects “exercise” their ciliary muscle less than people who focus mostly on nearby objects. If the ciliary muscle atrophied with disuse, then “distant-focusers” would suffer from degeneration more than the “near-focusers”.
Thanks for attemptin to clear up my hazy recollections. That’s probably similar to what I misinterpreted/misremebered. Eye structure/function isn’t my strong point. Pity I can’t find the original article, I don’t suppose the site archives articles that old?
By the way I love ‘The Last Word’.