How Optometrists And Poor Prescriptions Choices Can Hurt Your Eyesight

The eye is a dynamic construct. It is designed to see in bright light and in near darkness. Up-close and at great distances. It has an incredibly complex focusing mechanism, and billions of receptor sites to read the image received by your retinas. Glasses on the other hand, are a very primitive solution. Invented 600 years ago, when we knew hardly anything about the human eye or myopia, they are still a poor stand-in for our modern lifestyle induced eyesight problems.

Illustrating some of the issues, Jean-Pierre writes in the forum:

About my current status: it’s becoming more and more apparent that my left eye was undersprescribed so far, and the right one might be overprescribed, so that the prescription should actually be LE -2.5 / RE – 2. In theory, that would probably mean that my differential for computer work should be -2/-1.5, or maybe -2/-1.75, what do you think?”

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First off, this is what you need. Learning how to measure your own eyesight, and understand what the prescription is doing. Without this, the rampant misdiagnoses are likely to affect your long term eye health, as they do millions of people today.

Here is what I responded with, in the forum:

Yes, it is more than possible that your current prescription is inaccurate. The measurements done by the optometrist make a whole lot of assumptions, and are conducted on the assumption that one quick session will give accurate results.

They are wrong.

And this is how eyes get so far unequalized. Almost nobody would have more than 15-20% difference in left vs. right eye, if it wasn’t for prescriptions artificially inducing this trend. The same is true for a lot of astigmatism cases – the prescription lenses add a huge amount of the problem here.

Fixing the prescription is an important step. It will also help quite a bit (within a few months) with your progress overall, when there isn’t this unnatural pressure for each eye to adapt to those induced focal planes.”

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Could I be wrong about this?

Hardly. If you use the centimeter calculator (link at the very top of every page), and get different distant results for your left vs. right eye (wearing your glasses), then the prescription is simply incorrect.

If you have an incorrect prescription for a year or two, your eyes will adapt. Now you do indeed have a significant difference between left and right eye. Your bifocal vision is becoming compromised. Your depth perception becomes poor. Your vision without glasses is even worse, as your visual cortex has a very difficult time reconciling the focal plane change for each eye. None of it is necessary!

The problem is that we all have one dominant eye and one “weaker” eye. At the optometrist it is very easy to give the weaker eye an extra 0.25 correction, as it may appear to need it. But it doesn’t! It’s just normal biology.

Of course over a year or two the eye adjusts for the extra prescription, and now appears even weaker (though it’s not – it’s just adapted to the imposed focal plane change from the prescription). Now you go to back to the optometrist, and he might yet again add another 0.25. Maybe not at every consult, but skipping a prescription change or two still means an ongoing favoring of one eye over the other.

This is how you get these prescriptions with insane differential between left and right eye, and massive astigmatism prescriptions.

It’s lens-induced myopia, and slowly and over time poor prescription recommendations.

You have to take your vision health into your own hands. Understand how the basics work, which takes just a few hours out of your day. Once you do, you can come to your own conclusions, simply and accurately, like Jean-Pierre just did here (https://frauenfeldclinic.com/myopia-forums/topic/current-status-with-questions-again/#post-12585).

Let’s not have a lack of education ruin our eyes. Enjoy some healthy eyesight today!