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Nobody wants to rely on glasses to go about their day, but often it is impossible to avoid. Poor vision is usually a result of natural problems with your eyes.
Misshapen corneas and flawed lenses in the eye tend to lead to many common refractive errors. You can fix corneal issues like nearsightedness, farsightedness, or astigmatism with surgery. LASIK is a common procedure for misshapen corneas.
But malfunctioning lenses have different treatment options. Keep reading to learn how you can address problems with your lenses to avoid reading glasses.
What is Presbyopia?
The most common cause for needing reading glasses is age-related farsightedness or presbyopia. The lens in your eye is not as powerful a focusing tool as your cornea, but it does play a role in focusing light in your eye.
Your lens should be somewhat flexible and elastic to change focal lengths. It has to be able to stretch and move to focus light from different distances.
As you age, the lens begins to lose its flexibility and becomes rigid and locked into place. It locks into a constant state of farsightedness, making things up close challenging to see.
This process usually begins around age 40. A clear sign of presbyopia is holding things farther away from your face to be able to read them.
Other signs include blurry vision and suffering from headaches due to eyestrain. If you’re tired or in dim light, these symptoms become very noticeable.
Corrective Options
LASIK corrects your vision by reshaping your cornea. However, presbyopia affects your lenses, not your corneas, so traditional LASIK is not a great option to treat it.
But, some doctors may use LASIK to correct your non-dominant eye for close-up vision. Correcting one eye like this allows you to switch between eyes for different tasks. This is a method called monovision, and it is very effective, although it takes some time to get used to.
Devices called corneal inlays might better suit other people. A corneal inlay is a small plastic ring that gets inserted into one of your corneas. The ring allows focused light to enter in a pinpoint, creating clear up-close eyesight.
Refractive Lens Exchange
Another option is a procedure that replaces your natural lenses with artificial ones. This procedure is a refractive lens exchange or RLE.
RLE is an outpatient procedure, so you will be in and out of the clinic on the same day. Your surgeon begins by numbing your eyes with strong anesthetic eye drops.
Then, they create an incision in your cornea and leave a flap attached. Next, a probe gets inserted into the opening and breaks your lens into small pieces.
These pieces get removed with gentle suction. After they get removed, a preselected intraocular lens replaces the old lens. Then your surgeon closes your flap, and you can begin recovery from the procedure.
The purpose of RLE is to give you clear eyesight with a new lens. The procedure replaces your abnormal natural lenses with clear intraocular lenses.
These new lenses will give you powerful eyesight that could be the best you have ever had!
Would you like to avoid reading glasses? Schedule an appointment at Stahl Eyecare Experts in Manhattan, NY, to see if you can correct your vision without glasses!
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