I think the reason that a prescription is needed for nearsightedness but not for reading glasses is the amount of accuracy required in the prescription. I am nearsighted. If my prescription is off just a tiny amount, either my distance vision suffers, or my near vision suffers. There is a fine line between too strong and not strong enough. An error in either direction is not acceptable. No such precision is necessary with reading glasses. While it may be preferable to get reading glasses that are not stronger than needed, they are not being used for distance vision so there is no real harm in them being too strong.
They’re not always licensed? How bizarre. Over here it’s a proper professional job, with a degree-level course (A UK-style degree, where at least 90% of the classes are directly related to the degree title) and a master’s level course if you qant to fit contact lenses, then registration with the same organisation that regulates optometrists.
I think I will use one of those links to measure her interpupillary distance. As she’s under 18, she gets free glasses and a certain number of replacement glasses, so it’s not the cost, but the wait of up to a week that’s the problem. There is one major chain of optician’s that dispenses glasses on the same day, but they only see schoolchildren on weekdays before 4pm - while they’re at school, in other words, which is weird.
Perhaps it is not due to a huge markup in the stores, I do not know who is taking the big cut, but I do know that online prices are very much lower than those we see in the stores around here (Southern California).
Are you seriously contending that $600 (or even $100) is a good deal on something that you can get elsewhere, at an equivalent quality, for less than $50? Get real!:rolleyes:
In fact, a common joke euphemism for presbyopia is “Your arms are too short.” Up close you can adjust focus by holding what you’re looking at closer or further away. Beyond about 20 feet distance no longer matters. Well, that’s not entirely true. The distance of the lenses from the eyes can make a difference. With strong enough prescriptions it’s necessary to know the distance from the eye to the back of the lens (referred to as vertex distance). I rarely had to use it, but there’s a wicked looking tool for that purpose called a distometer.
It’s actually largely due to lobbying by various optometric associations and chain stores that opticians are largely unregulated. The OAA and ABO, as well as state associations, have campaigned to little avail to get licensing required, although they have managed to get a voluntary education and certification program in place (And yes, I was certified. I even still carry my card even though it’s expired.)
There’s a lot more involved than just pupillary distances in fitting eyeglasses, as shown in my first link.
The reason online glasses are cheaper is a combination of not having qualified dispensers to fit them, and selling low quality and discontinued frames. Fitting glasses correctly takes time and doesn’t lend itself well to high volume. Looking at Framesdirect and GlassesUSA’s order forms they don’t even have a way to specify seg heights for multifocals, which are critical measurements. And if I used the “average” PD they use as a default I’d have nearly 5 diopters of induced base out prism. You absolutely cannot get equivalent quality for less than $50. Wholesale prices on fair quality frames are higher than that. Wholesale on good quality is higher yet. Sure, $600 is lot to pay all at once, but it works out to less than 83 cents a day, cheaper than a daily cup of coffee. And mine only cost that much because I’m a high myope with presbyopia. About 2/3 of my cost was the lenses.
Maybe this is too obvious, but my comparison is “glasses for reading” (farsighted) versus “glasses for driving” (nearsighted). I really don’t care if Bob down the street picks out his own reading glasses because I don’t care whether his newspaper is blurry, but I DO care if he picks out his own driving glasses.
And yes, I’m nearsighted-- in the -6.5 range-- and while I’m pretty self-reliant, can cut my own hair, sew my own clothes, catch and clean my own fish, and bake my own bread, I really prefer having an actual optometrist figure out my glasses for me. A couple of years ago mine urged me to get a second pair of close-work glasses (they’re -4’s instead of 6’s, which cuts out some of the effects of high powered lenses but only lets me focus out to about 6 feet) and suddenly my work headaches got better. Genius! I never would’ve considered it if I were buying this stuff over the counter.
You may care but I can’t imagine that you have a right to not have nearsighted neighbors, let alone that gov regs requiring scripts for certain kinds of glasses were put into place for this reason. And there is certainly no prescription loophole for those without a license. Or a requirement at the DMV that I deminstrate that my glasses were prescribed specifically for me or are precisely right for the task. Or even, for that matter, that my brain functions sufficiently to operate a vehicle at any given time for me to renew my license.
Lots of interesting comments here on the shape of my malformed eye and the benefits of good vision and expert care, but no plausible theories re why some glasses require a script and others don’t?
Basically it’s that OTC readers aren’t worn full time, so there is perceived to be little if any chance of harm to the wearer. That may not be a good reason, but it is the reason. I personally think they should be regulated too, but obviously legislators think otherwise.
Anyway, unlike pharmaceuticals, the regulations only apply to making and/or dispensing eyeglasses. I couldn’t legally sell someone a pair of glasses without a valid prescription, but you’re not going to get in trouble for wearing glasses without one, at least not where I live.
Ah, but people are selling some eyeglasses without a prescription. There has been very little discussion of the original question of why plus prescriptions are available, but not minus ones. When I am picking through old eyeglasses, I know I see tons of mild minus prescriptions. The market should be there. Next time I am working with them, I am going to try on a few of the minuses and see just what they do to my vision. For close up work, I need very little correction. For distance, I mostly need a prism to avoid double images.
In a nutshell, plus readers are available because legally they don’t require a prescription. Any other type of correction does. Sure, you can find people selling used glasses at flea markets and garage sales, but that doesn’t mean it’s legal, only that things like that tend to fly under the radar. At the risk of a different hijack, laws concerning eyeglasses aren’t always vigorously enforced. For example, good luck finding an optometrist who follows the federal eyeglass rule.
Okay, Doug, I think we understand that scripts are required for some. But my original question remains: why are scripts required only for some types of correction?
It’s not that prescriptions are required for some types of correction–they’re required for all types of correction except ready-made readers. And the only reason for that one exception that I know of is that lawmakers decided they’re no more complex than holding a magnifying glass and therefore don’t need to be regulated. I think it’s a flimsy reason, but it would take someone with more influence than I have to get it changed.
You have this backwards - that is exactly what the cheap “magnifiers” are for, the farsightedness of aging. My dad buys these all the time, keeps a half a dozen pairs around so he always has some handy.
I read that link. What about that do you think they are violating? The last few times I have been to the eye doctor, that is exactly what happened. 3 different locations.
Maybe the problem is that nobody has tried to market cheap minus diopters? The plus diopters have a ready made market - aging folks with otherwise good vision who need a “boost”. Maybe nobody thinks there is a sufficient market for the reverse.
Maybe it’s different in your area, but paragraphs (a) and (b) are routinely ignored. They’re supposed to hand you your prescription immediately after your exam without you needing to ask. They can withhold it until the fee is paid, but only if they require all fees to be paid immediately. Where I lived when I was an optician all of the ophthalmologists gave out prescriptions readily, but only one optometrist. The rest wouldn’t give them unless asked, and then they would try to talk the patients out of it. There were a couple who refused to give out prescriptions unless the patient made a scene about it. I occasionally saw prescriptions that had liability waivers in violation of paragraph (d). I’ve only heard of one office ever getting fined for a violation, and that was large practice in Dallas that reportedly had hundreds of complaints filed against it.
FWIW, I’ve always had to ask, but have had no problem getting them.
I’m an optometry student. We’re taught to hand patients their prescription at the end of every exam. At the VA hospital I worked at we didn’t always do this, more due to forgetting than anything else since we were quite busy, but would always hand it out if asked. Currently at the low vision center I’m rotating through, we make it a point to hand patients all their prescriptions.
The reason they’re supposed to hand the prescription out without being asked is that a lot of people don’t know they’re entitled to it.
What’s supposed to happen is this:
Doctor performs exam
Doctor writes out prescription
Doctor immediately hands prescription to patient
Or if immediate payment is required for all patients it can be put in chart and handed to patient immediately upon payment.
What actually happens all too often is this:
Doctor performs exam.
Doctor writes prescription in chart, but not on prescription form.
Doctor walks patient to dispensary and hands chart to assistant or optician.
Doctor moves on to next patient.
Assistant or optician starts showing frames.
If patient asks for prescription then depending on the doctor either the assistant can interrupt doctor to get prescription written for patient, or patient may be told to come back later to pick it up. Either way patient is frequently made to feel like a nuisance for asking for it.
I worked a few years in a four doctor office (until about 2004) and this was how things were done. The two younger doctors would give them out readily enough, but the two older doctors would make the patients wait several minutes, then come out and spend several minutes trying to talk the patient out of it before finally begrudgingly filling it out and handing it over. Then they would later lecture the optician about working harder to “keep the prescription”. I managed to avoid being directly involved in those shenanigans most of the time because I usually spent my days cutting lenses and doing major frame repairs. (I should point out that they were all good doctors, and on the whole treated their patients and staff very well.)
I’m glad to see cromulent say that optometry students are being taught to hand out the prescription after the exam. That hasn’t always been the case. The prescription release rule became law in 1980, and there are still optometrists practicing who could legally refuse to give out prescriptions when they started. The American Optometric Association fought tooth and nail against the law (it took two years and a U.S. District Court of Appeals decision to get it passed.)
Some doctors are out of the dispensing business. I have had my exam, been given my prescription, and told when I have it filled, come back and have it checked and the frames fitted.
I have a print out I made after I checked my own vision. I wonder if I took it to an optometrist, if he could fill it without a doctor’s signature?
I took a pair of generic off-the-shelf reading glasses to the optician at Wal-Mart to get one of the nosepieces screwed back on (I had the screw and the right size screwdriver, but because the screw itself was so small I was finding it impossible to actually hold it in place while I tried to screw it in myself). The guy fixed them for me completely free of charge, despite the fact that I’d purchased the glasses elsewhere.
Probably not. Every state law that I’ve ever seen requires the doctor’s signature and license# for a prescription to be valid. Also, some optometrist’s office make it a policy to only fill their own prescriptions. There used to be kind of a grey area where an optical shop could duplicate a persons current glasses, but that’s no longer true, at least not in my state.
In my experience, most opticians will do this just as a courtesy, since the screw itself costs barely anything and it helps build goodwill. (My current frames don’t have screws to hold the lenses in place, but earlier ones did and this would happen from time to time.)