Re: Eye adaptation to lenses?

Yes, you have opened an old can of worms here, but I still want to
throw in my 2 cents worth. It has been established for more than a
century that we all tend to start with juvenile hyperopia, or literally
translated "the farsightedness of childhood." We grow out of this
natural hyperopia in most cases by about age 6 or 7. If we are lucky,
we stop right around the proper eye length and we don't need corrective
lenses until we are in our 40s.
Myopes go through their natural hyperopic years much quicker, and then
all bets are off as to when the myopic stretching will stop. There are
general trends in all studies, such as myopic parents tend to have
myopic kids, and Asians are more myopic than other races. But, through
all the studies, it seems to come down to the general belief that
myopia is an inevitable byproduct of mandatory public education and the
simple fact that we work at near for thousands of hours more than we
look at distance. If you recognize that we were "originally built" to
hunt for food on the horizon, kill it and eat it...hyperopia once
ruled. Then, with indoor plumbing, pennicillan and Playstation
2...myopia has taken over.
So, the belief that we can intervene to stop myopia, I feel, is like
trying to stop the fact that humans have grown progressively taller for
the past 100 years. Its all about adaptation. If you give young
myopes plus lenses to cancel their myopia, you might also take them out
of school and send them hunting with a bow and arrow as well.
Charles wrote:
> I'm curious to what extent, if any, the eyes will adapt to lenses. For
> example, if you took a person with good vision and made him wear lenses
> with mild cylinder correction, would he just see blurry in one
> dimension forever, or would his eyes somehow adapt over time?
>
> It seems like when you get your eyes checked for prescription, there
> might always be a bias toward the current prescription if there is any
> adaptation of this sort. If this is the case, maybe there is value in
> biasing towards less power to avoid power "creep" over time.
>
> I'm thinking about this because in my own case I started wearing
> glasses at about age 25 and it was just a mild prescription to fine
> tune my vision. It wasn't really necessary, but things were a little
> more crisp with the glasses. Over time I seem to have become more and
> more dependent, and now after 10 years I can't stand not having the
> glasses on and the prescription has "grown". I can't help but think
> that maybe if I had never gotten glasses in the first place, I still
> wouldn't have them.
>
> Is there anything to this? Based on the threads I've read here, I tend
> to think that what I'm saying goes against the generally accepted
> evidence?
> --

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