So CalMeacham, is there any truth to using pinhole glasses to improve vision? As I fight against losing my near vision as I get older, I bought a pair of the pinhole glasses that, along with some eye exercises, are supposed to be able to improve your vision. Did I waste my money?
Confirmed. (Actually one of the links that you claim debunks it.)
(Actually, the study doesn’t fully confirm it, but I think the jury is still out.)
A chapter in the book is devoted to that, too.
Here are the facts:
1.) Pinhole glasses work, whether with one or multiple pinholes, although the latter take some getting used to.
2.) pinhole glasses severely limit the throughput of light, though. They’re best suited to bright situations, for that reason. Standard eyeglasses gather a LOT more light.
3.) pinhole glasses are a standard optical device. Before you could shape exotic lenses, or actually sculpt the cornea itself, pinhole glasses were often the only way for people with some severe eye problems to see effectively.
BUT
4.) Pinhole glasses won’t “cure” anything. Using them will not improve your myopia or hypertropia. It’s just a way to provide clear imaging by restricting the aperture, pretty severely, and has no lasting effects.
5.) pinhole glasses are not recommended for young children, whose systems are still developing.
You can buy a set of pinhole glasses from the back of a magazine or from TV, but you can also make them yourself pretty easily.
The device was patented, twice, since the end of the 19th century, but those patents ran out long ago. There are two patents for novelty items – pinhole glasses built into a swizzle stick and a pinhole monocle, each imprinted with advertising and intended for people to use for reading men us in restaurants. Well-lit restaurants, one hopes.
Back to the original question, there’s pretty much always been close work to do: flint knapping, making clothes, preparing/cooking/preserving food. As long as you’re not too blind to function at arms-length distances, you could probably become a badass flintknapper or atlatl carver or leather tanner or shoemaker or whatever and trade for whatever you needed. Myopia isn’t an obstacle to foraging or trapping either.
Now that I think of it, visual acuity doesn’t seem altogether important for anything except hunting small game via projectile weapon. It seems like in most activities it is irrelevant (as long as you’re nearsighted).
It’s been suggested that cameo makers and the like may have hired very myopic people precisely for their ability to do close work.
But pinholes will let you see even finer detail.
Fine jewelry goes back a surprisingly long time, and is probably one of the first things where fine vision was required.
I’d suggest that the very first crafts requiring fine vision, and could have benefited from some sort of vision aid, were making needles and then threading them. Bone needles have been found back into the Neolithic, complete with very small “eyes”. Making and threading fishhooks might also qualify.
Eventually, of course, people became literate, and you needed help to read. That seems to be what Seneca was using his water globe lenses for.
Let me mention that nearsightedness delays age-related far-sightedness. I am mildly nearsighted but, by taking my glasses off, I was able to read without difficulty until I was 65. Since then I have used progressives. I would argue that nearsightedness is an adaptation to reading.
Lay person working for over a decade in ophthalmology here.
There’s actually a pinhole corneal inlay (i.e. a pinhole device implanted directly into the corneal tissue of your non-dominant eye) about to come out on the market in the US. Possibly as soon as this year, almost certainly by next year. My clinic has been involved in the FDA trials for it for over three years now.
Also, that Straight Dope article…is not one of Cecil’s better efforts. I’m too tipsy right now to grab sources, but the idea that reading in childhood causes myopia is…brutal.
A permanent 1.6 mm aperture in one eye? That seems…weird.
As I’ve said, it used to be common practice to use pinhole glasses for people with conditions like kerataconus, where any sort of eyeglasses couldn’t correct vision. But then they developed cornea-sculpting techniques (even before LASIK and other laser-based techniques) that allowed them to correct these conditions.
Using a permanent aperture in the eye (this device says it’s an implant) looks like a step backwards – you’re permanently restricting the amount of light going to that eye, while corneal sculpting techniques would be keeping a large aperture and thus a lot of light going to the eye. If you had to, you could always wear pinhole glasses for temporary improved vision. Even pinhole contacts.
Is there something I’m missing here? Are there situations where the eye is so badly affected that permanent pinholes are the only solution?
The small aperture excludes the light that would have been passing through the outer areas of the lens (which at that age is no longer flexible enough to refract properly at short distances). Interestingly, the vast majority of patients report little to no effect on their distance vision. Keep in mind this device is implanted in the cornea of the non-dominant eye; an eye that is really doing next to none of the heavy lifting for distance vision.
I’m limited in how much I can say, since the final FDA approval has not yet come and our study results are probably still confidential, but I have the feeling this device may well revolutionize the way we treat presbyopia. One of the surgeons I work for actually has this device in his eye, having gone to Japan (where it’s already actively being used) for the procedure.
I’m still a little surprised that this is being done for presbyopia, but I’ve looked up a bit about it now.
This is being offered as an alternative to “monovision” treatment, where they fix one eye for distance and one for near vision, sand unlike monovision it apparently leaves depth perception relatively unchanged. It also claims to be a less invasive procedure than the corneal-sculpting ones I mentioned, with fewer risks and complications.
I suspect it’s the fact that the aperture is restricted , more than the possibility of minimizing refractive errors near the edge, that’s more important. And, while 1.6 mm is larger than the pinholes used in many pinhole devices, it still represents a permanent restriction. It’s smaller than the pupil’s ordinary diameter, of course (if it wasn’t, there’d be no point to the procedure), but large enough to admit a fair amount of light. I’m just not sure I’d want it done to me. Although, with my myopia, that’s not going to happen, anyway.
I doubt you couldn’t walk around the house without your glasses. I can, and my vision is really bad (it’s good with corrective lenses). I can’t read, nor watch tv or computer, but since I know already the layout of my house and where my stuff is, I can wake up, go to the bathroom, shower, prepare coffee, prepare some simple meal, all without using my glasses/contacts. I bet I could probably also semi decently clean my house. For most of the chores, you don’t need that fine vision.
This conversation has drifted far afield from the OP, which is about vision impairment that can be corrected with non-surgical optical lenses.
^^^ My apologies for the tangent. :smack:
It’s not that much of a tangent – the implant is, if not as small as the pinholes I mentioned, still a very restricted aperture in one eye – it’s just permanently placed there, instead of being held in place by a “monocle”-like setting or lorgnette.
What did people do
'ere glassses were invented?
They tripped and fell alot,
but less so when they squinted.