Poor eyesight can affect many aspects of your life, including your safety. Working, driving, and even crossing the street can be much more dangerous when your eyesight is bad.
Moreover, poor eyesight can be caused by serious problems that could lead to blindness, such as glaucoma, cataracts, diabetes, and macular degeneration. Any reduction in eyesight should be cause for a visit to an eye doctor. Here are four signs that it may be time for new glasses or contact lenses:
Blurry Vision
It seems elementary, but blurry vision is a sign that you need corrective lenses or that the corrective lenses you have are inadequate. When distant objects are blurry, you have myopia, just like 40% of Americans. This is otherwise known as being nearsighted. Conversely, when nearby objects are blurry, you have hyperopia, or are farsighted.
Both of these conditions occur due to the eye’s lens focusing in front of the retina at the back of the eye (myopia) or focusing behind the retina at the back of the eye (hyperopia). In young people, the cause of the inaccurate focus is typically due to the shape of the eye not matching up with the lens. Those with myopia have eyeballs that are slightly elongated while those with hyperopia have eyeballs that are slightly compressed.
Once you reach 40 to 50 years of age, a condition known as presbyopia can set in. This is a form of farsightedness that is not caused by the shape of the eyeball, but by a loss in flexibility of the lens. That is, as we age, the lens becomes less flexible and less able to focus on nearby objects. Presbyopia may necessitate reading glasses or bifocals when paired with myopia.
Regardless of the age of the patient, blurry vision often necessitates new eyeglasses. For those who require optical financing, lease-purchase programs offer optical finance options in which a leasing company pays for the glasses and leases them to you for a recurring lease fee. At the end of the lease, the glasses belong to you.
Tired Eyes
The lens of the eye can be focused by the ciliary muscle in the eye. When an object is blurry, the ciliary muscle attempts to alter the shape of the lens to bring that object into focus. Eye strain occurs when the ciliary muscle becomes fatigued from overwork. Eye strain can manifest itself as pain or fatigue in the eyes and may be accompanied by blurred vision or double vision.
A corrective lens, either in the form of glasses or contacts, can reduce eye strain by bringing objects into focus with little or no work from the ciliary muscle. No credit needed financing for glasses can be provided through lease-purchase programs. Optical finance using lease-purchase programs requires only recurring lease payments with no down payment.
Headaches
Poor eyesight can lead to headaches. Headaches can result from eye strain, but can also be caused by squinting. Scientifically speaking, squinting causes a phenomenon called the “pinhole effect” in which a pinhole can act as a lens by blocking out much of the light and only allowing light that is passing straight through the pinhole. The result is less distortion and more focus at the expense of the area of the image.
The combination of headaches and blurry vision should be checked by a physician because they can also be symptomatic of migraine. In migraine, the headache causes blurry vision by overwhelming the nerves in the face and head, whereas in myopia the reverse happens with blurry vision causing headaches. If it is blurry vision that is causing your headaches, glasses or contacts purchased using optical finance programs can relieve the headaches.
Objects Appear Distorted
Another eye condition known as astigmatism occurs when the lens or cornea of the eye is irregularly shaped. This causes light passing through different parts of the lens or cornea to focus differently. The result is an image that is blurry or distorted regardless of the distance. As such, it is a different condition from myopia or hyperopia, although it can accompany either. Like myopia and hyperopia, astigmatism can be corrected with glasses or contacts.
Poor eyesight can compromise your health, comfort, and safety. Optical finance through lease-purchase programs can enable patients to obtain the corrective lenses they need.
