touch Lens Options For Baby Boomers - Bifocal Soft touch Lenses For Eyes Turning 40

If you are like the typical palpate lens wearer and have recently reached the grand old age of 40, you may find yourself retention that book a microscopic farther away from you to clear up the letters. At some point your arms no ifs ands or buts come to be just a microscopic too short to read the morning paper, and the phone book that keeps shrinking the text size, well you know the problem.

[b]Lens[/b]

In the past, most palpate lens wearers naturally switched back to glasses at this stage of their life. Those of us who are known as the baby boomers are not accepting discontinuing palpate lens wear when the eye starts losing it's potential to accommodate, or change focus between distance and near vision. Though the cause is still being argued, many eye doctors believe the prolonged growth of the lens in the eye, hardening of the lens tissue over time, and a small displacement of the lens transmit all lead to the loss of focusing potential for close vision that degrades between the ages of 40 and 60.

In our Northern Colorado palpate lens practice, over time we have evolved what seems to work best for most palpate lens wearers facing this change in life. For some citizen it is very traumatic, being the first palpate and awareness they have of the aging of their body.

The old options were threefold:

1. Stop wearing palpate lenses and go back to glasses
2. Keep wearing palpate lenses for distance vision and wear reading glasses over the palpate lenses when you need to work at near
3. Wear a palpate lens on one eye for distance and a palpate lens on the other eye for reading

While these methods worked for some citizen very well, they left much to be desired. Inevitably bifocal palpate lenses were destined to be advanced and they were. Soft bifocal palpate lenses are made any distinct ways but they all share in base some form of simultaneous viewing of distance and near vision. This presents the brain with somewhat of a dilemma in studying which image to attend to. When I say image it is a microscopic misleading. We are regularly not referring to duplicate vision but funny feelings and ghost like rings or altered depth perception appearances up close. The brain can regularly adapt to this given sufficient time, and learn to filter out the optical abnormalities.

The types of designs we work with include:

1. Annular lenses with a small central zone 2-3 millimeters in diameter, to fit in line with the black pupil area. A secondary area surrounds this to the edge of the lens. The lenses regularly come in a distance version where the small central zone in front of the pupil has your distance prescribe for maximum distance clarity. Surrounding this is the near zone for reading which has a small overlap over the edges of the pupil.
2. The reverse form is regularly made for the same lens with the near vision correction being a small central zone in front of the pupil for maximum reading, surrounded by a distance prescribe that extends to the edge of the lens.
3. Some soft palpate lenses perform a similar ensue by slowly changing the prescribe from the town to the lens edge.
4. Lastly, one palpate lens enterprise utilizes a distinct type of optics and has complicated surrounding rings alternating distance and near focal distances resembling a bulls eye target.

So what have our years of palpate taught us?

• Patients who expect perfect vision are rarely happy with soft bifocal palpate lenses.
• People who have clear goals in their minds of the specific tasks that are foremost to them for finding well with palpate lenses tend to do very well.
• Patients who set their expectations on being able to function about 3/4 of the time with palpate lenses and expect to need some form of glasses occasionally over the contacts to read extra fine print or drive straight through a mountain blizzard at midnight do very well.
• It takes a while to adapt and regularly a few adjustments of the prescribe to reach the best correction we can achieve.
• A inexpensive goal is to see 20/20 distance vision in your dominant eye and 20/40 distance vision in your eye that is not dominant. That regularly allows sufficient overlap for sufficient near vision without too much incompatibility between the eyes.
• The distance town eye regularly ends up with a lower bifocal power than the near town eye.

Some palpate lens companies are adapting this doctrine and utilizing overlap between the two lenses in the intermediate ranges of 3 to 7 feet. This a very distinct doctrine than trying to fit a true distance and near bifocal lens on both eyes but it seems to be what works best today.

Then there are citizen with very specific tasks. I have some patients who only wear palpate lenses for skiing and don't need perfect distance vision or perfect near vision, just sufficient to see where they are going. palpate lenses forestall the problem of eye glasses fogging under goggles. In this case under correcting both eyes a microscopic works wonders. Or some citizen just want lenses for distance for a night out on the town, maybe with one lens designed to allow reading a normal sized menu. The options are endless and you can take heart from my 96 year old outpatient who still loves her royal blue palpate lenses. It's never to late to try something new!

touch Lens Options For Baby Boomers - Bifocal Soft touch Lenses For Eyes Turning 40

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