What do they give us points?
Florenceans are likely to be mistaken, believing that their inventor of lenses, habitually used today to correct refraction anomalies, was their fellow citizen Salvino Armati. The home of this invention is widely debated, but it is well known that it was done in a period earlier than that in which Salvino Armati lived. The Romans, at least, should have known something about the art of complementing the power of the eye. Pliny wrote that Nero used a concave precious stone framed for this purpose in a ring to watch games in the Coliseum. However, if fellow citizens of Salvino Armati think that he was the first who created these vision assistants, then he would have explored a good prayer for the forgiveness of his sins. Despite the fact that they improved the sight of some people and relieved them of pain and discomfort, for others they were just an additional torture. Points have always hurt, big or small. Even the best of them never improve the vision to a normal state.
In the fact that glasses can not improve the vision to a normal state, it's easy to see by looking at some color through a strong concave or convex lens. You can see that the color in this case is less intense than when viewed with the naked eye. Since the perception of the form is determined by the perception of color, it is obvious that both the color and the form should be seen less clearly with the glasses than without them. Anyone who looked through the window to the street knows that even flat glass worsens the perception of color and shape. Women who put on glasses due to a slight deterioration of vision, often notice that wearing them leads to a greater or lesser degree of color blindness. You can see how in the shops they take off their glasses when they want to pick up some model of clothes. However, if the vision is seriously disturbed, then with the glasses, the colors can be seen better than without them.
The fact that glasses should be harmful to the eyes, obviously follows from the facts given in the previous article. A person can not see through them if he does not have the degree of refraction anomaly that the glasses need to correct. However, refractive anomalies in the eye, which is left to oneself, are never permanent. Therefore, if a person achieves good vision with the help of concave, convex or astigmatic lenses, this means that he retains a permanently determined degree of refractive error, which in other conditions would not persist continuously. The only result of this situation is to expect deterioration. Experience shows that this usually happens.
After once people have put on glasses, the power of their lenses in most cases must grow steadily to maintain the degree of visual acuity that was provided by the first pair of glasses. People with presbyopia who put on glasses because they could not read the fine print also often find that after they have put them on for a while, they can not already without their help read a larger font that was previously easythey were given. One patient with a myopia of 20/70, wearing glasses that provided him with a 20/20 vision, found that only a week later his eyesight had deteriorated to 20/200 with the naked eye. When people break their glasses and do without them for a week or two, they often find that their eyesight has improved. In fact, vision always improves to a greater or lesser extent, when glasses are removed, although people do not always pay attention to it.
No one can deny the fact that the human eye is "outraged" with glasses. Every oculist knows that patients should "get used to" them and that in a number of cases, such accustoming is not achieved. Patients with high degrees of myopia and hypermetropia experience great difficulty in getting used to full correction. Often, this can not be achieved at all. The strong concave lenses necessary for high degree myopia create the illusion that all objects have much smaller dimensions than in reality. At the same time, the convex lenses increase these dimensions. All this is unpleasant and irresistible. Patients with a high degree of astigmatism suffer from very unpleasant sensations when they first put on glasses. Therefore, they are warned that they are used to glasses first at home, before deciding to go out. Usually such difficulties are surmountable, but often not. Sometimes it happens so: those who are well enough to endure glasses in the daytime, can not get accustomed to them in the evening.
All glasses to a greater or lesser extent narrow the field of view. Even with very weak glasses, patients can not clearly see if they do not look through the centers of the lenses. The frame should be at right angles to the line of sight. If they do not, then in addition to reducing vision, sometimes there are such annoying symptoms as dizziness and headache. Thus, they can not freely turn their eyes in different directions. Of course, glasses today should be designed in such a way that it is theoretically possible to look through them from any angle, but in practice the desired result is rarely achieved.
Difficulties with keeping glasses clean is only one of the minor inconveniences associated with glasses, but it is perhaps the most unpleasant of them. On wet and rainy days, glasses are covered with droplets of moisture. In hot days sweat leads to the same result. On cold days, they often mist over the moisture of breathing. Every day they are so often exposed to contamination with moisture, dust, fingerprints from accidental touches by hands, which is rarely allowed to see objects without any interference.
Reflections of strong light from the glasses are also very unpleasant, and on the street can be very dangerous.
Military, sailors, athletes, physical piles and children experience considerable inconvenience in wearing glasses because of their lifestyle and activities. He not only leads to the fact that the glasses are broken, but quite often and confuses them with the right focus, especially in the case of astigmatism.
The fact that the glasses disfigure the appearance of a person may seem not worth considering here as a fact. However, mental discomfort does not improve the overall health or vision. Despite the fact that we went so far in creating the virtue of glasses that we consider wearing them part of our lives, there are still a few unspoiled minds for which wearing glasses is simply unpleasant and whose vision with glasses is far from an acceptable level. When a child appears in glasses, then the heart of any person will shrink.
A generation ago, glasses were used only as a help to weak eyesight. Today they prescribe to a lot of people who without them can see as well or even better. It is believed that the hypermetropic eye is able to cope with its difficulties to some extent by changing the curvature of the lens through the action of the ciliary muscle. The eye with simple myopia is not endowed with this ability, since an increase in the convexity of the lens( which, as it is supposed, is the only result of accommodative effort) would only increase the difficulties. But myopia is usually accompanied by astigmatism, and it is believed to be partially overcome by a change in the curvature of the lens. Thus, the theory leads us to the conclusion that the eye, in which there is any refraction anomaly, is almost never free when the
is open, from anomalous accommodative efforts.
In other words, it is believed that the proposed accommodation muscle is forced to bear not only the usual load of changing the focus of the eye for vision at different distances, but also an additional load to compensate for the refraction anomaly. Similar adjustments, if they actually took place, would naturally lead to a strong strain of the nervous system. To reduce this stress( which is believed to cause a variety of functional nerve disorders) to such an extent to improve vision, glasses are prescribed.
However, it was proved that the lens is not a factor either in the implementation of accommodation, or in the correction of refractive errors. Consequently, under no circumstances can there be a stressful condition of the ciliary muscle, which should be reduced. It was also proved that when vision is normal, there is no abnormality of refraction, and the outer muscles of the eyeball are at rest. Consequently, there is no strained condition of the external muscles, which should have been removed in such cases. When there is any tension of these muscles, glasses can correct its effect on refraction, but they can not remove the voltage itself. On the contrary, as has been shown, glasses should make the existing state even worse.
However, people with normal eyesight wearing glasses in order to reduce the estimated muscle tension often benefit from this. This is an amazing illustration of the effect of mental suggestion. Flat glass, if you could inspire people with the same confidence, would give the same result. In fact, many patients told me how they got rid of various uncomfortable sensations through glasses. In the frames of these glasses, as I discovered, there was a simple flat glass. One of these patients was an optician who himself built such glasses and had no illusions about them. Nevertheless, he assured me that when he does not wear it, he has headaches.
Some patients are so strongly suggestible that you can reduce their discomfort or improve their vision with virtually any glasses that you want to wear on them. I saw people with hypermetronia, with great comfort wearing glasses for myopic, people who do not have any astigmatism, but who receive great satisfaction from glasses for correcting this vision defect.
Many people will even think that they see better with glasses that actually worsen their eyesight. A few years ago, one patient, to whom I prescribed glasses, consulted an ophthalmologist whose fame was much higher than mine. He gave the patient another pair of glasses, disdainfully responding to the glasses that I had prescribed to him. The patient returned to me and began to tell how much better HE sees with the second pair of glasses than with the first. I checked his vision with new glasses and found that while my glasses provided a 20/20 vision, my colleague's glasses gave him only 20/40 vision. The reason for this was that he was simply hypnotized by the great authority of this ophthalmologist, having assured himself that he sees better, although in fact he saw worse. Convince him of the opposite was difficult, although he agreed that when he looks at the test table with new glasses, he sees only half of what he saw with the old.
When glasses do not relieve headaches and other symptoms of nervous origin, it is assumed that this is due to improper selection. Some doctors and their patients demonstrate just an amazing degree of patience and perseverance in their joint attempts to get closer to the correct prescription of the prescription. One patient who suffered severe pain at the base of the skull, only one doctor was selected 60 times! Prior to this, he visited many other oculists and neuropathologists both here and in Europe. His pain was removed in five minutes by the methods described on our website. At the same time, the patient's vision temporarily became normal.
Lucky for those many people who were prescribed glasses, but who refused to wear them, thus avoiding not only discomfort, but also significant damage to their eyes. Others, possessing less independence of thought, greater share of the spirit of the martyr, or being much more frightened by the oculists, are subjected to unnecessary, incomprehensible tortures. One such patient wore glasses for 25 years, although they did not save her from prolonged suffering and so greatly impaired her vision that she had to look over them when she wanted to see something in the distance. Her oculist assured her that she would have had much more serious consequences if she did not wear glasses, and was very unhappy that she was looking over her glasses, instead of looking through them. Considering that refractive anomalies constantly change day by day, hour from hour, from minute to minute even under the influence of atropine, exact selection of glasses, of course, is impossible. In some cases, these fluctuations have such a scope or the patient is so immune to psychic suggestion that the corrective lenses do not achieve any relief, and they inevitably become an additional inconvenience. Even at best, it can not be assumed that glasses are more than a very unsatisfactory substitute for normal vision.