This doesn’t sound right to me, but I’m hoping someone with more ophthalmic knowledge can ring in on this one. I was talking to a work friend the other day due to my excitement over finding cheap Rx glasses that I ordered and am anxiously awaiting delivery. So while we were talking about vision stuff, it came up that her right eye needs correction and has needed correction since she was a kid. Since her left eye needs no correction, she (and her parents) was told she doesn’t need to worry about it.
This sounds crazy to me. My vision was improved by 25% over time, with proper correction (this according to my optometrist who monitored the improvement over 10 years). My work friend says she was told her right eye helps with depth perception and peripheral vision, but if she closes her left eye her distance vision is at least as bad as mine. So I don’t get it. When I asked her why she would want to go through life with shitty vision in one eye, she could just wear one contact if she was so repulsed by wearing glasses, she didn’t really have an answer. I told her she was a weirdo.
So, I ask those with more knowledge in these things. Is this a normal way to go? Is it really just fine to let one eye be shitty when it’s perfectly healthy otherwise and totally correctable? Do the majority of people with one “good” eye and one “bad” eye opt for no correction? This is the first time I’ve heard of someone going this route. She doesn’t drive, obviously, now I wonder if she never learned because she knows she would never pass the vision test.
That sounds odd. I’d wonder if maybe she was tested by one doctor one time and given one opinion that may have been right at the time or that her parents didn’t understand fully. I’m further going to suggest that they took this single opinion and ran with it. (Mom, I can’t see well out of this eye/We took you to the doctor and he said it’s fine)
She’s probably used to it at this point, but hand her your glasses and have her hold one lens over her bad eye and see if she doesn’t want to go make and eye appointment right away to go get some kind of corrective action taken. Some (most?) people don’t realize how bad their vision is until they’ve had good vision. I know I’m not the only person who tried on someone else’s glasses and was amazed at how well I could see.
I also have one good eye and one bad eye. It doesn’t really affect my everyday life, except in little ways - when I want to see something more clearly I turn and look at it with my left eye (like Atticus Finch, haha). Also I think I have terrible depth perception, or maybe I’m just clumsy. Anyway, I do have glasses, but I can’t be bothered to wear them unless I really need them - for example, at a museum where I have to read tiny bits of information on the wall.
It sounds like advice for someone that doesn’t want to wear glasses. It’s also advice from many years ago by one doctor. I personally would want the corrected sight.
There is one thing that really explains it. My daughter is 20-20 in one eye and about 20-200 in the other. She has tried wearing glasses and tried not wearing glasses and has chosen not to. For one thing, she still has binocular vision without glasses. But the main thing is that when she puts a lens on one eye and not the other, the image in the corrected eye is about 15% smaller than in the good eye. If you don’t believe this, take off your glasses and, if they are corrected for near-sightedness, you will see the image get small when you view it through the lens. If they are corrected for far-sightedness, the image grows. In fact, once you are aware of this phenomenon, you can see it on other people just by looking at them. At the interface between lens and no lens you will see a facial feature change size. It is especially easy if you have a closeup photo.
So my daughter, having to choose between some binocular vision and different size images that she couldn’t fuse, chose the former. Now she is her mid-40s, she finds she can read just fine with the “bad” eye. So she still doesn’t need glasses.
Another personal anecdote. My left eye had fine vision for years, the right eye was nearsighted. I didn’t wear glasses for a long time because I didn’t think it effected me. After a number of years, as my left eye also became nearsighted, I had to get correction for both eyes.
But, apparently, because I didn’t correct my vision for all those years, I also have a weird effect in that I have a hard time getting my two eyes to focus on things in the distance together. According to the doc, I got used to using my left eye exclusively for distance vision and my right eye for near vision. Now both are corrected to about 20/20. Problem is, I still seem to shift between eyes for near and far.
I tend to only notice it when driving or playing softball. When I’m at bat, as the ball gets closer, I lose track of it as my eyes switch from one to the other. And it jumps to the side. More seriously, I have trouble checking to the right when I drive… because my right eye is not used to seeing distance. But if my nose is in the way of my left eye when glancing right, then I have to use that right eye. And then looking back to the left I have to switch eyes again, and it messes with my brain a little. Sometimes it feels disorienting when checking around quickly for traffic at highway speeds. That’s kind of unnerving.
This makes sense to me. I have the same situation…I’ve always been very nearsighted in my left eye, with near-perfect vision in my right. It’s true that you can function without correcting the bad eye, but that’s because the good eye takes over and does all the work. I don’t think it seems like a good idea not to correct it.
My ex-wife had one good eye and one that needed correction. She wore one contact lens and had glasses that had no correction at all on one side. Eventually she got Lasik on the bad eye.
Nowadays she needs reading glasses for both of them.
I have one eye about 20/200 without correction and the other for years had no correction at all (they both need correction for astigmatism now.) I got glasses in 6th grade. It was never even remotely suggested that I shouldn’t bother. And while I don’t bump into walls or anything when I’m not wearing them, there is a marked difference in my depth perception without them. I wouldn’t want to drive while not wearing them.
I recall from one of my NPB (Neurology, Physiology and Behavior) courses the Professor(a neuroscientist IIRC) mentioned something I found profoundly interesting and very strange. In people with strongly asymmetric vision, the brain basically learns to ignore the the lesser eye if you don’t get glasses when you’re young-ish. The way he explained it, the brain tries to reconcile the input streams from the two eyes, but can’t because they just don’t agree with each other. Eventually, as you grow up your brain just gives up and takes the input stream from the better eye. The other eye just provides secondary information(like depth and peripheral vision) and vision when you wink the good eye.
So, it might actually be the case that wearing glasses, or just 1 contact might not help. The brain learned from an early age to just ignore that eye.
I have a similar condition(albeit with both eyes being unable to read with glasses on). I was told it’s called accommodative insufficiency, and it’s supposed to be a neurological problem regarding the innervation of the muscles which focus your eyes. Basically, your eye muscles never learned to focus that way. So today, they have trouble bending your eyes that far.
There is supposed to be training you can go through to fix your eyes. Basically, I was told you’re supposed to do this regiment of which essentially amounts to eye-robics which works out your eye focusing muscles. My doc offered it to me, but I didn’t take him up on the offer.
That’s not necessarily true in my case - although maybe that’s because my right eye wasn’t too bad when I was really young. I remember it first becoming an issue when I was in middle school. I never bothered to wear glasses then, and nowadays I only wear them if I feel the need, but wearing them definitely improves my overall vision, even though it’s only my right eye that needs the correction.
I suspect for the case my professor laid out to be true it needs to be strongly asymmetrical. Enough that it’s not worth the brain power to try and reconcile the fuzzy image from the right eye with the sharp image from the left eye.
That’s called “having a lazy eye” in several languages (I’ve seen cases where the expression meant something else in English) and avoiding it is actually given as a reason to get a kid glasses ASAP when it’s detected that they have a vision problem in one eye. In my dad’s case it wasn’t even “strongly assimetric vision”; his astigmatism was smaller than mine or those of my brothers, yet he had a lazy eye and we didn’t.
But even getting glasses at a young age , patching the stronger eye and undergoing vision therapy may not fix the lazy eye (also known as amblyopia, at least in my case). Wearing glasses has been pointless for me since I before I was a teenager- I don’t see any better with the glasses on, because I don’t see out of the weaker eye unless the stronger one is patched or held closed. I suppose that I could have continued patching that eye for longer than four years- but when my good eye was patched , I was basically blind. I couldn’t read, or watch TV or walk down the street with that patch on. The amblyopia itself doesn’t cause many problems. I don’t have good depth perception because I have to rely on other cues such as size, speed or shadows. View-Masters and 3-D movies don’t work for me. But I can drive - I probably tend to wait for a bigger opening than other people when I change lanes or go through an intersection, but that’s it.
I've had a couple of opthamologists/optometrists tell me that if I should ever lose the vision in my stronger eye, the vision in the weaker one will improve enough for me to function. Because my brain won't ignore the image from that eye if it's the only image coming through and there is nothing physically wrong with my eye
Wow I thought I was the only one.
I was 20/20 in my right eye and 20/200 in the left. I failed the vision test when I went to get my driver’s license and had to get glasses, later contacts.
I started putting my hand over my right eye and forcing my left eye to do the work, I don’t know if that had anything to do with it, or if it was from wearing contacts, but now I’m 20/20 in both eyes.
Same exact situation for me. My right eye can see through lead, and my left eye is useless for reading anything more than 4 feet away. The Opthamologist basically told me to “wait until the right eye goes.”
I have a feeling he was just trying to save us the money on getting glasses when they weren’t really necessary. This was 18 years ago. Never been in a traffic accident, rarely drop anything.
I know, this thread is so enlightening. I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone with the 20/20-in-one-eye, 20/200-in-the-other thing before. I’ve even had optometrists who thought it was kind of strange! When I was younger I wore contacts, and only needed one of them for years. I used to buy the set in the same prescription so I’d always have a spare.
Now that I’m older and I’m going farsighted, it’s a weird effect where I’m nearsighted in one eye and farsighted in the other. My glasses are nutty and cost a fortune!
