Monday, January 23, 2012

Reading without Glasses

Sometime ago I read the advise to read without glasses. I started doing it and I found out that it was actually easier on the eyes to read without glasses or lenses. The disadvantage of course is that you have to keep the book very close to your eyes. In my case it means very close.

Unfortunately I can't do it with the computer because to look at computer screen without glasses is tremendous nuisance and the strain on my eyes is immense. Though I did try it for a week once.

I also read somewhere that if you never start wearing glasses for distant vision and keep reading without glasses, you vision will be good enough for you to be able to read without glasses, approximately -3 diopters. I wonder if that statement is true. If it is, we might be here on something and it would prevent a lot of grief. This mild myopia would be relatively easy to correct.

But I am also aware that you can't believe everything you read. Like the other day I read a book where the author claimed that wearing glasses does not make your vision worse. He sounded very sure of himself too but I am the living proof that it is a lie!

Anyway, reading without glasses or, if your vision is not too bad, doing all the close work without glasses might be a good idea.

The funny thing is, when I read with lenses in sometimes I have hard time focusing but with the naked eye I could see the page without trouble.

3 comments:

Thomas Wold said...

Good, balanced discussion of a very important topic. Thanks for posting and keep up the good work.

The Mad Hatter said...

I re-calculated my own prescription so that they will be underpowered and are only good for about ~3ft. I think it will help with my eye strain and the unnecessary use of higher powered corrective lenses.

I found research dating back to '92 that found that chicks wearing a corrective lenses at a an early age will develop a need for corrective lenses of about ~80% of the corrective lenses:

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1475-1313.1992.tb00315.x/pdf

The idea is to try to wean myself off of glasses. I'm now in my 20s and I don't know how effective it will be. Ideally my parents would have told me all this but they just listened to the optometrist.

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