There are many reasons why a person doesn’t always wear their glasses. Maybe it’s a comfort thing, maybe it’s an aesthetic thing, maybe it’s a fear of being made fun of, maybe you want to complete a She’s All That style transformation.
But beyond the look and feel, some don’t wear them because they fear that wearing glasses will actually weaken their eyesight.
Well, they’re wrong.
Optometrist Dr. Mimi Tran D.O. tells Spring.St that if you need glasses to focus on things then your eyes are already weak, not the other way around.
“Our body changes and develops and if the shape of the eye changes then the vision will also change,” she explains, adding that the squinting that goes along with not wearing one’s glasses can cause headaches, eye fatigue, crows feet, and wrinkles around the eyes. Basically, it’s a bad deal.
Okay, so wearing glasses doesn’t weaken your eyesight. But what about contact lenses?
“People who use their contact lenses properly significantly prefer contact lenses [over glasses] because their peripheral vision is not blocked and their vision is generally sharper,” says Tran.
But, she says contacts can weaken your eyesight if the user doesn’t take proper care of their lenses and disposing of them at the proper times, i.e. daily, fortnightly, monthly.
“Over-wearing contact lenses gives a person a higher chance of getting eye infections and corneal ulcers,” she explains. “If the corneal ulcer causes a scar in the visual axis then vision is ‘weakened’ and blurred forever.”
As far as misconceptions, glasses weakening eyesight is not the strangest one Tran has come across in her practice.
She's had patients say with certainty that if a child reads in the dark they will make their eye sight worse.
Just to clear that up, it won't.
"Another one is that a child should eat carrots to make their vision better," says Tran. "Carrots are wonderful for beta carotene so it helps with the health of the eye but not to make the prescription 'lesser'."
So eat up, visit the eye doctor once a year and WEAR YOUR GLASSES!
