Ready-made glasses can be a real headache

I have bought prescription glasses from Spec Savers and Tescos with top of the range lens, and they are a real pain. They are Variofocal, and for distance they are a pain in the butt. At Spec Savers I got my money back. At Tescos they replaced them with the same poor results. So, so much for Prescription Glasses ! I have given up and just put up with the discomfort.

what a load of rubbish.Hope youget your eyes tested otherwise you may havesaved money but be lind by time you are 68

I reply to the reply to me, by nsp.
If you think I am talking rubbish, please follow my ongoing conversation with HiDEye.
I provide references to refereed, published books and papers. Nobody else has bothered to do this.That is part of the scientific method by which truth is arrived at.
Please provide references to prove your claim that my posting is “what a load of rubbish”.
I suspect that you have been brainwashed by the publicity of chain opticians who just want to sell you expensive glasses.

Anybody reading this post should ignore it completely. I have a degree in optometry and can confirm that it is riddled with inaccuracies and (quite frankly) total garbage. And I would implore the author to ensure that he/she is having regular eye exams to rule out the possibility of eye disease.

lets hope you are not using off the shelf ones for driving as that is dangerous you could run over a child because you cant see properly. Your insurance is void if you have an accident wearing them just to save a few pennies you put other road users and pedestrians at risk. Sounds like you are the selfish one.
Lets hope the peole you see in your profession do not take the same attitude as you

“I quote from Agarwal, Agarwal, Apple and Buratto, 2002. Also, in the rhesus monkey, which has an accommodative apparatus similar to that of the human and develops presbyopia on a comparable time scale relative to its lifespan, the ability of the ciliary muscle to alter its configuration in response to topical cholinomimetic drugs or electrical stimulation of the Edinger-Westphal nucleus clearly declines with age.”

I quote below from Optometry & Vision Science: April 2000 – Volume 77 – Issue 4 – pp 204-210
Articles Age-Related Changes in Human Ciliary Muscle Pardue, Machelle T. PhD; Sivak, Jacob G. OD, PhD, FAAO

“The young ciliary muscle appeared to consist of individual fibers uniformly distributed with little connective tissue (Fig. 1A). With increasing age, the muscle fibers appeared to form bundles with greater amounts of connective tissue separating these bundles, particularly in the radial and circular areas (Fig. 1B).”

I am a trained observer with 25+ papers in Computing and Artificial Intelligence. What I say happened to me, did happen. It is the truth. In view of the quotes above, it is not unreasonable to expect the Bates’ exercises to improve visual accuity.

I make no comment on 2.5 diopters being a crossing-point between “normal” and “abnormal” eyes, and perhaps you can quote references to support this claim.

I think the theory of the magnification offered by high-dioptre glasses is rather complex, and it is a long time since I did any optical physics. Here is a simple experiment. I took 1.5 and 2.5 dioptre glasses with similar-sized lenses. With the 2.5 dioptre, I adjusted my distance so that a page of Which just fitted inside the perceived height of the lens. I then slide in the 1.5 dioptre onto the same eye, and roughly a 15% increase in perceived height of the image resulted. In other words, an area of desk appeared around the Which page, which was roughly 15% of its height.

If you type into a word processor like Microsoft Word, and change from 10 point to 12 point text, which is a 20% height increase, you will see a profound improvement in readability. I suspect this has to do with edge identification in the striate cortex, but that is a whole new argument about which I don’t yet feel I know enough to pursue. But this does explain why when the optician prescribes you stronger glasses, you do see VERY MUCH better. But it appears that your focusing ability then weakens so that movement back to the weaker glasses is far harder, first because it harder to focus, second because your brain has got used to focussing less extremely, and third because you have lost the magnification effect.

Retraining the brain to focus again is hard. I have just order a pair of Traynor perforated glasses, to experiment further in this direction. Does anybody have a theory of how these do or do not work?

I do know for sure that a practicing optician moved me from 1.5 to 2.5 dioptre glasses, and that the two Bate’s exercises that I describe allowed me to go back to 1.5, and to throw away my long-distance glasses. Why on earth did that optician not recommend me to try these exercises? I told her that I used a computer at work. She did not even recommend me to change focus every 10 minutes, which is advice now generally available on the web, to avoid “spasm in the ciliary muscle”. I do know from experience that such spasm
exists, and that near-far focusing will alleviate it. I have theories about its cause, but have read no papers on it. Perhaps you can enlighten us.

Why on earth are you so quick to condemn the Bates’ exercises?

Thank you for your input but as I see it you approach this in a specialised way.
Most people want quick practical answers to anything including sight problems.
Spectacles – for all their many drawbacks – supply the answers.

“Why on earth are you so quick to condemn the Bates’s exercises?”

1) I am not quick to condemn. This subject has been discussed and studied endlessly.

2) Very little objective evidence is findable to prove it.

3) It is very subjective – ‘beauty is in the eye of the beholder’ has more truth than realised.
Humans have amazing brain functions that turn a ghastly retinal flashing wham-bam image into the most astounding perception of the real world. So what is a bit of image manipulation (clearing a nearly focused image of near print) to such an organ? ‘Mind over matter’ is another ancient saying, still applies with all its punch.

4) It takes dedication to do these exercises and most people cannot be bothered with the effort. There are very well known (convergence) exercises that are objectively provable to work but wild horses can hardly get people to do them even when they are mindlessly simple to do. Human nature makes its judgements on practical bases ie spectacles work.

Practising optometrists are forced* to work under NHS regulations at hopelessly uneconomic return for what is provided to the public. Trying to encourage eye exercises that won’t be carried out is just not sensible.

[* monopsony: effectively HMG is the only major controller of the purely optometric market. No optical business can do without it. No other profession is forced to sell its prime expertise at derisory rates. Optometrists would far far rather have full payment for that and stop the subsidy from spectacles. It is this cross subsidy that has given rise to all the arguments shown here, and the arise of frankly parasitic outlets whose whole unique selling point is at least in part fraudulent. Add in the multiple commercial ‘official’ optical outlets who just aid the ‘race to the bottom’ of the professional values they claim to elevate.

In spite of all that the public are vastly well served and many individuals are very aware of the benefits they have received – including life saving ones – and which continue with enormous technical inputs on both the eye examination and spectacle design and dispensing sides.]

There is a famous eye safety poster that is worth repeating:

“You are on your last pair of eyes – look after them very carefully”

Another is:

“False teeth work well. False eyes do not.”

I am replying to your reply to me, HiDEye.

Thanks for what seems a balanced reply. However, I would like to comment:

2.) The only real support for the “5 A Day” campaign, is I believe, the Massachusetts nurses study, and later trials on isolated extracted vitamins and anti-oxidants have failed to produce positive results, and yet this health advice is now widely accepted.
4.) The convergence exercises may be well-known to you, but unless an optometrist tells me about them during a consultation, my only access to them is through the sort of web site that I mentioned.
We are all now well-used to our GP’s recommending exercise as the solution to obesity, high blood-pressure and high blood-sugar, and a lot of people I know take regular exercise. Exercise for the eyes should not be too difficult a concept to get across.

Why cannot UK optometrists develop a similar web-site to sell advice on exercises, at a similarly reasonable price as the Better Vision web-site?

One sympathises with the problems of the current funding regime, where the true cost of an eye examination is amortised out over the purchase of several pairs of spectacles, and I would encourage Which to examine this regime.

However, if I pay (6 years ago) £160 for an examination and two pairs of speactacles that turn out not to be suitable and which are heavily scratched within 18 months, my market reaction to that is going to be to buy my spectacles elsewhere, provided I can find the quality. I am not so cynical as to suggest that the softness of the plastic used, is aimed at achieving planned obsolescense, and I gave the benefit of the doubt in suggesting that the need to “grind” them on the premises was the cause, but the alternative explanation does remain a possibility.

My problem as a heavy computer use is not really very specialised: there must be millions of us out there. I am at the better-informed end of that spectrum, because my AI studies have forced me to read the literature on Vision. That does give me a fairly painless entry to the relevant literature that will be denied to the majority of people with similar problems.

We rely upon optometrists to keep us appropriately informed.

The branch of the well-known chain at which I bought my unsuitable spectacles was in Milton Keynes, which is one of the heavy computing centres in the country, and one would have expected practitioners there to have read up on the related problems and produced a hand-out, at the very least.

Your parting shot
“You are on your last pair of eyes – look after them very carefully”

is very well aimed at the use of safety glasses in engineering and chemical works.

But what are you saying here, exactly? That if we use glasses other than the expensive ones provided by an optician, that we will irreperably damage our eyes? If so, then I must ask you for proof that the appropriate studies have been carried out. The comment on dying rabbits were a very concise expression of the concept that co-occurrence does not imply causation, and that controlled studies are necessary. My single personal experience is that the very spectacles supplied by the optician, made it difficult to carry out my work, and
promoted unsuitable accommodation that took me some to reverse using exercises. You have the opportunity here to refut my claims, by referring myself and other readers to known studies that would do this. They can then very easily find them using Google.

Your punters are also pushed for time, and they rely upon you for good information, rather than short epithets that could be interpreted as swelling your takings rather than optimising our health. I don’t want to have to negotiate with a health professional in order to obtain the truth: I expect you to make it freely available to me, admittedly in a cost-effective way that might require us to make some effort ourselves.

As I said the last time I visited my optician. “Those narrow little glasses aren’t ‘designer glasses’. I am a designer, and what a designer needs is the largest area of glass, so as not to impede his vision.”

Selfish Optometrists who spend their day ensuring their patients have healthy eyes and potentially stopping people from loosing their most precious of senses. The NHS eye test is badly funded, Optometrists have to charge for their time by charging more than £1 for their spectacles inorder to continue to offer their services. The basic equipment that is needed costs thousands of pounds, the NHS test fee doesn’t pay for that.

I am glad your ready readers are fine. I hope you still have regular eye tests to make sure you are not loosing your sight. I hope you are visually safe for driving.

It’s their job to test eyes and they are well enough paid for the work they do.I shouldn’t have to buy glasses from them to pay their bills- I have lots of my own

It’s a funny thing y’know, but you never see an optician on a bike do you?

So you would pay £75 per examination then??

£75? For 15 minutes of work? Not worth that!

Varifocals

I think the eyes have it.

If you were getting double vision in one eye only can you please explain how you think that was a muscular problem that could be solved by using the Bates method. Most probable cause of monocular double vision would be cataract which would be detected at an eye examination.

I believe that RR have their place in the market and often tell my patients that their prescription would lend itself to RR but I also tell them to try on multiple pairs of the ‘correct’ strength as they can vary quite wildly. In the same way I have no problem telling someone that they need proper prescription glasses to attain the best vision. My patients trust me to give them the best advice and I can think of no quicker way to lose my business than by betraying that trust to try and make a quick buck!

I run an Independent practice and would love to ditch the NHS test and only charge an appropriate amount to cover the costs of running the examination room; this will not happen whilst some offer an eye test as a loss leader deliberately. I may not like the system but I have to work with it.