A recent study in Nigeria found that 64% of students believed that wearing glasses can make vision worse. Another study revealed that 30% of people of Karnataka, a state in India, and 69% in Pakistan believed that wearing eyeglasses causes damage to the eyes. Does wearing glasses make your vision worse? Is it proven?
- No. Wearing eyeglasses don’t damage your eyes. It’s a myth, which we are going to break in this article.
- Your prescriptions may indeed get stronger as years go by, but it’s not true that your eyeglasses are the results of your worsening eyesight.
- The real truth: As we get older, our vision deteriorates, because of which, you may need to upgrade your prescriptions from time to time.
As we age, the lenses in our eyes stiffen over time, making it difficult to see at different distances. There are 2 reasons why most people wear glasses – Myopia (short-sightedness) where things at a distance appear blurry, and hyperopia (long-sightedness) were things closer to you appear blurry. Hyperopia is generally age-related. Many people in their 40s or 50s notice hyperopia when they begin experiencing eye strain while reading in low lighting.
Breaking the Myth: Why Eye Glasses Cannot Be Associated With Worsening Vision
Some people believe that wearing glasses weakens the muscles around the eyes. And that if you force your eyes to focus without glasses, or wear a lower prescription, it can prevent your refractive errors from progressing. However, that’s a misconception.
Depending on how much light hits our retina, the natural lens of the eye changes shape with the help of flexing ligaments called zonules to adjust to this light. But as you get older, these ligaments lose their flexibility, and the lens becomes hard, making it difficult for your eye to focus light correctly on the retina.
While we want to believe that exercising eye check up and the zonules will keep our vision sharp for long, but it is not true. As we age, there are permanent changes to the shape of the lens, which no amount of eye exercise can reverse. Corrective wear is the solution to help you see clearer.
If children with myopia do not wear eyeglasses or any appropriate corrective wear, they may try to self-correct the problem by sitting close to the TV, holding the book closer, or squinting to see the distant objects. These behaviors are known to worsen the myopia condition.
Your eyesight will worsen progressively, irrespective of the type of refractive error you may have. That is a fact. This means you’ll need to keep up with your glasses prescription to continue seeing clearly. If you do not like the idea of wearing glasses or contact lenses, ask your ophthalmologist about LASIK eye surgery.
While corrective glasses or lenses are temporary vision correction devices, LASIK provides permanent solution to your vision defects.
LASIK may seem like a lot of money, but if you factor in the average cost of buying contacts or eyeglasses to keep up with your prescriptions, it is higher than LASIK eye surgery cost.
The vision is corrected almost immediately, which means no eye strain and the need to wear eyeglasses or contact lenses ever.
