Autumn! It's a funny old time of year. Cold mornings, crispy leaves, conkers and at the opticians, a rash of people of a 'certain age' who come to see us looking rather bewildered that doing something as simple as reading the paper is now really difficult if not impossible.
So if you are amongst that group this autumn, take heart that everything is normal. It's irritating not being able to see thing up close all of a sudden, but it's entirely normal.
I suspect you're wondering what's gone wrong all of a sudden.
It's all got to do with the LENS in your eye. This sits just behind your PUPIL and is the bit of your eye that provides a lots of the focussing power. It's also capable of varying it's power so you can see far away to do something like see to drive, and focus more strongly to be able to read things up close like a book, newspaper, iPad, that kind of thing.
It's made of the same tissue as your skin and it behaves like skin ( only it's see through!), so it continues to grow all the time. Now your skin grows, and the top layer sheds and becomes dust, but your LENS is in your eye, within another membrane too, and can't go anywhere.....so it just grows thicker and thicker....and eventually (around the age of 40 or so) it gets SO thick that it's not springy enough to keep changing shape to focus on near objects any more, and THAT'S when people notice their reading vision starts to become blurred and difficult. Headaches are often a symptom too as the muscles that can usually change the shape of the LENS really easily start to strain and even then can't force the lens to change shape enough.
This becomes a particular problem in autumn because there's SO much less sunlight around as the nights draw in, and relying on indoor lighting as opposed to having sunlight to read by, means that the actual light levels are reduced a thousandfold.
Sorting this problem out is quite simple with spectacles. We make up the missing power either with reading glasses, varifocal lenses, office lenses....we have quite a choice. Reading glasses are just one power so are only set for one distance; varifocals are a blended lens with a distance correction in the top of the lens, and the power gradually increases down the lens till the reading power is at the bottom; office lenses are set for PC distance at the top and lenses down to reading at the bottom.
If your reading vision has suddenly become an issue, or reading has started to give you headaches, or if you know someone experiencing these problems. make an appointment with us today, and let us help to make reading a pleasure again.
At IntelliSight Opticians we recognise that the best quality varifocal lenses offer the best solution for the problem of not being able to see to read up close any more. So this autumn we have THE BEST FOR LESS, our best quality varifocal has £50 off.
67 High Street • Redcar • TS10 3DD
