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Contacts For You? |
The vast majority of people requiring vision correction can wear contact lenses
without any problems. New materials and lens care technologies have made today's
contacts more comfortable, safer and easier to wear. Consider the questions and
answers below to help assess whether they're a choice you should consider. Contact lens wear may
be difficult if:
- Your eyes are severely
irritated by allergies; You
work in an environment with lots of dust and chemicals; You
have an overactive thyroid, uncontrolled diabetes, or severe
arthritis in your hands; or
- Your eyes are overly
dry due to pregnancy or medications you are taking.
After a thorough eye
examination, your suitability for contact lenses and the
specific contact lens option that best meets your requirements
will be determined.
What
are the advantages of wearing contact lenses?
- Many wearers feel
that contact lenses show their eyes in a better light or
don't like the appearance of eyeglasses. Better
vision correction due to the reduced obstruction from eyeglass
frames. They
provide excellent peripheral vision. No
fogging up in warm rooms. No
splattering during rain showers.
- Less hassle as they
don't get in the way during sports and other recreational
activities.
What
are the disadvantages?
- Contact lenses require
getting used to. New soft lens wearers typically adjust
to their lenses within a week. Rigid lenses generally require
a somewhat longer adjustment period. Except
for some disposable varieties, almost all lenses require
regular cleaning and disinfection, a process that, although
requiring only a few minutes, is more than some people
want to undertake.
- Some types of lenses
increase your eyes' sensitivity to light.
What lifestyle do
you lead? What kind of work do you do?
For those involved in sports and recreational activities, contact
lenses offer a number of advantages. In addition to providing
good peripheral vision, eliminating the problem of fogged or
rain splattered lenses, and freeing you from worries about
broken glasses, contact lenses also mean you can wear non-prescription
protective eye wear. Looking sideways through the lenses of
glasses leads to prismatic effects because you are not looking
through their centers. Your eyes have to coordinate differently
to cope with this. This does not happen with contact lenses
because you always look through the centers of the lenses as
they move with your eye movements. Your
occupation and work environment should also be taken into consideration.
People whose work requires good peripheral vision may want
to consider contacts. Those who work in dusty environments
or where chemicals are in heavy use are likely to find spectacles
more comfortable.
Do
you like wearing glasses?
Do you like the way glasses feel? Do you like how you
look in them? No longer is it really necessary to choose
between either contacts or glasses. Some of today's contacts
are so easy to wear that you can use them intermittently
-- for special occasions, while participating in sports
or to match your fashions. New
single-use, one-day disposable lenses are comfortable
and do not require cleaning. They may be easily interchanged
with glasses.
How
Contact Lenses Correct Vision
Contact lenses are designed to rest on the cornea,
the clear outer surface of the eye. They are held
in place mainly by adhering to the tear film that
covers the front of the eye and, to a lesser extent,
by pressure from the eyelids. As
the eyelid blinks, it glides over the surface of
the contact lens and causes it to move slightly.
This movement allows the tears to provide necessary
lubrication to the cornea and helps flush away
debris between the cornea and the contact lens. Contact
lenses are optical medical devices, primarily used
to correct nearsightedness, farsightedness, astigmatism
and presbyopia. In these conditions, light is not
focused properly on the retina, the layer of nerve
endings in the back of the eye that converts light
to electrochemical impulses. When light is not
focused properly on the retina, the result is blurred
or imperfect vision. When in place on the
cornea, the contact lens functions as the initial optical
element of the eye. The optics of the contact lens combine
with the optics of the eye to properly focus light on the
retina. The result is clear vision. |
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