How Can We Help?
Presbyopia
Sometime around the age of 40, most of us will begin to notice that our near vision is getting worse. We have to hold objects further away to see them clearly. This is a condition called Presbyopia.
A distant object will be seen clearly if it is focused on our retinas. If you imagine the light coming from that object is a metal bar, the end of that bar will be touching our retinas. Now imagine that object is slowly getting closer. That bar will begin moving beyond the back of our eyes resulting in a blurry image. We can bring the object back into focus by adjusting the lens inside our eyes. This is called accommodation. The closer the object gets, the more we have to accommodate.
As we get older, our ability to accommodate diminishes and as it does, we have to hold things further from us to see it clearly. Eventually, our arms get too short and we seek vision correction.
There are a number of ways to get this correction. We can have a separate pair of glasses just for reading, or we can combine the far and near prescriptions into a multifocal lens. There are two basic kinds of multifocal lenses; lined and invisible. The lined variety come as either bifocal (one line) or trifocal (two lines). As the names imply, there are 2 or 3 focal distances available. In the invisible type (more commonly called progressive lenses), the prescription gradually changes from distance to near. There are infinite focal distances giving us continuous clear vision regardless of how far the object is from us.
For contact lens wearers, there are basically 3 options: see distant objects well in both eyes and wear reading glasses, see well far away with one eye and close up with the other (called monovision), or bifocal contact lenses. The best option is bifocal contact lenses.
Bifocal contacts are available in both soft and gas permeable rigid materials. While soft bifocals work well, gas permeable, by far, provide superior vision. Dr. Friedberg wears gas permeable bifocal lenses.