I’ve worn (hard) contact lenses since my teens. In recent years I’ve been a bit concerned for whatever reason that perhaps my prescription would be lower if I wasn’t “used to” the higher prescription, and I decided to put it to the test. So before getting an eye exam I went without lenses or glasses for about a week. The optometrist was initially amazed. He said my prescription went down significantly – “it was like seeing a completely different person”. So I thought I would get a significantly different prescription, but it didn’t work out that way, and he only lowered it a bit.
Because what he did next was to have me put the lenses in, and then do a vision test with me looking through some of his machine’s lenses. Apparently the idea was that he could adjust the combined lenses to some prescription and test for that. And looking at the vision test under the combined lens test my prescription was only a bit lower than what I currently have.
The reason, he said, is because the lenses change the shape of your eyes, and your prescription with your eyes in one shape is not the same as your prescription with your eyes in another shape.
So I said OK, in that case, just make me out lenses that are the same shape as my eyes are after not wearing lenses for a week, and I’ll be able to get by with a much lower prescription. But he said that wasn’t a good idea, because it could be that the new shape would be harmful for my eyes in all sorts of other ways, and it wasn’t worth it. My point was that if I was a new customer who just walked in off the street and had never worn lenses, he would be giving me the lower prescription and based on the more “natural” shape. But he said bottom line is that this is currently working for you and it’s not worth trying to change things.
Does anyone knowledgeable have any insight. Firstly, is this guy correct that the shape of the lenses dictate the shape of the eye, and that this in turn influences the prescription? And more significantly, is he correct that it’s not worth going with a different shape than what’s being dictated by the lenses?
This is strictly a single-case study (anecdote?) but since nobody else has responded I’ll throw it into the pot for contemplation:
I was, ultimately*, deemed unfit for laser eye surgery because I have a condition called keratoconus. My eyes are shaped more like footballs than like spheres with a smaller sphere mounted on it. The second specialist I visited recommended an optometrist who specialized in keratoconus to work with me. The first thing that optometrist did was get me out of the rigid gas-permeable (flex) lenses that I had been wearing for decades and have me wear just my eyeglasses for about a month. Flex lenses are notably more forgiving than hard lenses, but they’re not as comfortable or forgiving as soft lenses (which were invented years after I got into contact lenses. The optometrist who put me into flex lenses did so because, as he explained, “they’re like braces for the eyes and will help your eyes resist changing and getting worse. Your vision will still get worse, but not as quickly.”
When I returned after wearing only glasses for a month, the referred optometrist reexamined my lenses and my eyes. The first thing he said was, “Hmm! These lenses are correcting for an astigmatism you no longer have!” Furthermore, he noticed that my prescription was a lot worse than the flex contacts were treating – but that was expected, since I no longer had a semi-rigid cup helping my eyes resist changes.
I have since been wearing soft contact lenses, my eyes are not changing any faster than they were with the flex lenses*, and the keratoconus still prevents me from qualifying for any existing surgical vision-correction procedures. Nevertheless, I keep hoping someone will invent some way to help me gain “perfect” lenseless vision again.
–G!
- There’s a tale there, but I won’t digress (and I may have already posted it around here somewhere). Suffice it to say that I have good reason to believe a renowned Laser Eye Surgeon to-the-Stars is a greedy ^$$hole.
**But, even when they were prescribed, the optometrist told me the period for the most rapid changes to my prescription would be during my teen years, which was why the ‘braces for the eyes’ were recommended. The rate of change has, naturally, slowed down now that I’m in my fifties.