I hope you are having a great day. Today I wanted to talk about contact lenses and mainly about bifocal contact lens options. I get asked every day during eye exams about bifocal contact lenses. When you reach that magical age (40-45 typically) when you have presbyopia, or need bifocals, you still have options to stay away from glasses. In this post I am going to talk about those options and who I tend to encourage towards the different options during eye exams here in Broken Arrow.
When it comes to contact lenses and bifocals most people typically have 3 options.
Option 1
This is to do distance only contact lenses and pick up some reading glasses for near and computer tasks.
Option 2
This is to do what is called monovision. This is where I under correct one of the eyes and fully correct the other eye. The fully corrected eye sees good off in the distance but poorly up close and the under corrected eye sees poorly off in the distance but good up close. This means with both eyes open both distance and near vision is good.
Option 3
This is multifocal contact lenses. These lenses have zones like rings on a tree that split all the light that hits our eyes into 2 different camps a near camp and a far camp. This usually takes about 5 minutes of wearing before our brain starts to figure it out and typically the distance gets figured out first with the near being the last thing figured out.
Option 1 I don’t really like because it doesn’t get people out of glasses. You still have to search and find your glasses. Having said that this is the only option for some people, but almost everyone can do this option.
Option 2 is my go to method for people that are just a little near sighted (-2.50 or less) because I can sometimes get them where they only have 1 contact lens to wear making contacts half priced. I also like this method for people with large amounts of astigmatism. I also like this option for people under the age of 50 because the bifocal power doesn’t have to be very strong at this point typically and the under correction is easier to adapt to.
Option 3 is my go to method for people over 50 that don’t have a lot of astigmatism. I don’t really like the multifocal lenses that have astigmatism built into them. The vision just isn’t stable long enough in my opinion.
For more information about bifocal contact lenses you can check out this website. https://new.myalcon.com/home/
Thanks for reading and I hope you have a great day and check out my first post if you haven’t already https://onevisioneyecare.com/2020/01/eye-doctor-laws/
