Computer Glasses
When I was 26 years old and in graduate school, I went to an optometrist. He was of the old school -- I mean the REALLY old school. He believed that nearsightedness could be reversed -- not through laser surgery, which did not yet exist, but through eye exercises.
It didn't work for me. Maybe I quit too soon. Or maybe my eyes were too far gone.
Anyway, while he was examining my eyes, he chatted. "You got your glasses when you were either in the third grade or the fourth." He was right: the fourth.
"You could not see the blackboard." Right. "Then, a few years later, you couldn't see the blackboard again, so your parents bought you stronger lenses." Right.
"Now, here you are again. You can't see distance. You want stronger lenses." Right.
"How would you like to stop coming back to get stronger lenses?" Rhetorical question.
He was actually trying to sell me on coming back for ever-weaker lenses. That would have been great, only the eye exercises didn't work.
Then he showed me something that kept my eyes from getting any worse for the next dozen years.
"You trained your nearsightedness." I did? "Each time you got stronger glasses for distance vision, you kept them on when you read. Your eye muscles focused tightly on the book page because they were corrected to see the blackboard. Then, as they adjusted for close vision, you lost your ability to see at a distance. So, you went back to get stronger glasses. Over and over."
There was a solution, he said. "Your original optometrist should have prescribed bifocals: corrected glass on top, plain glass on the bottom. You should have read through the bottom."
Bifocals for kids? "Yes."
He prescribed two sets of glasses for me: corrected at a distance and corrected to see a book page -- about 22 inches. "Read only with the second pair," he said.
I took his advice. My eyes quit getting worse. I was still using those same lenses 12 years later when I got my first computer. I used them for computer reading. I found that I could read much longer without eye strain.
Today, I have three pairs: trifocals for driving and occasional reading (barber shop, etc.); computer lenses; reading lenses (weakest). I live mostly in front of a computer screen or else have a book in my lap.
I went to an optometrist with similar views in the early 1980s. She had a room full of ancient eye-exercising machines that were pre-World War I. With them, her patients reversed myopia and corrected cross eyes.
She was hostile to video games. "The intensity of concentration, of eye focus, will make nearsighted people out of a generation of gamers."
I don't know. What I do know is that when I got reading glasses in 1968, my eyes stopped getting more nearsighted, and I could read longer without eye strain.
Too bad I didn't get bifocals at age eight.