Here we go with the crazy, preconceived notions again. I told you I was at my third job. First time in months but I understand. It is a major event to get me there and get me home. Anyway, a colleague there looked at me with my glasses and looked perplexed. She wanted to know where my big, thick glasses were!
Now this is an intelligent woman with advanced degrees. If she is thinking this, what are other people thinking?
Basic tutorial, just in case: corrective lenses, especially the big, thick ones, are for errors of refraction. Refractive errors occur in the front of the eye. There is a malformation of the lenses that causes the light to bend ‘wrong’ and focus either in front or behind the retina. The same thing can happen if you have an eyeball with the ‘wrong’ shape. Some eyeballs are long and ‘skinny’ and others are short and ‘fat’. In either case the light does not focus on the retina and things are out of focus.
Corrective lenses bend the light. They do it in such a way that the light will fall properly on the retina and we can see clearly.
There are two, main types of refractive errors. Myopia, or nearsightedness, makes it hard for us to see things far away. Hyperopia, or farsightedness, makes it hard for us to see close up. There are also astigmatisms. I don’t know a lot about these but I think they distort things because of imperfections in the lens. They can also be corrected with glasses.
Age-related macular degeneration, as most of our readers know, is a problem at the back of the eye. Bluntly put, our maculas are dying. Maculas are parts of the retina, located at the back of the eye. The only type of ‘corrective lenses’ that may help AMD are prisms. They relocate the image off the macula and on to a part of the peripheral retina, a part that should still be functional. [Lin/Linda: prismatic glasses don’t work for everyone with AMD. Click here for an article about them.]
So that is pretty much that. AMD is not a refractive error and is not going to be helped with ‘coke bottle bottom’ glasses. We are not all Mr. Magoo!
There are many, many different types of eye disorders. Most of them are not correctable with glasses, but the average person does not appear to know that. Once again it appears it is up to us to go out and educate people.
We are not all Mr. Magoo!