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Comment by ysw0 | Hacker News Reader

Anecdote: I used to get new glasses/prescriptions every year. Every year my prescriptions would get stronger. Last couple of years I stopped renewing my glasses and whenever I absolutely need to get new glasses, I have the store use my old prescription. For whatever reason, my eye sight stopped getting worse. I think by wearing stronger prescriptions, your eyes adapt to it and you get more and more myopic.

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Warning to anyone taking the above as medical advice: perhaps it might work for you, but do discuss with your doctor and check that you are not driving vehicles with worsening sight while believing it's fine. By all means try it, but get it checked so at least you have the data to know whether it works for you.

> but do discuss with your doctor

This requires having a doctor you trust.

My experience with most doctors is that I can trust them about as far as a used car salesman.

Start by finding an eye doctor that doesn't have a glasses shop attached, imo. Or one that isn't "attached" to such a shop in a way they would profit from it, I guess. Without insulting any doctor in specific, my thought is that making a profit from glasses being sold is likely to impact how likely the doctor is to prescribe new glasses.

> making a profit from glasses being sold is likely to impact how likely the doctor is to prescribe new glasses.

And beyond that, following the logic from the recent surgery thread: they see their patients see better. They see all the good cases, where someone walks out more confident and with better sight. Their product helps people. But then so do homeopathic placebos (to a certain (measurable) extent), and that's the hard part to figure out.

Of course, in this case everyone truly does see better when they walk out and what GP is wondering about are the long-term effects. This stuff is complicated, though I frankly have a hard time believing this claim of "just stop wearing glasses and you'll see better". Surely someone would have noticed that? But without doing a deep dive into the research here, it's all just speculation on both their part and mine.

Have a link to the surgery thread?

I believe they’re referring to this thread from December: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25472970

At my ophthalmologist office the glasses store is a different company than the ophthalmologist's office.

They might have a revenue sharing agreement, maybe, but they don't even encourage you to use it.

> Or one that isn't "attached" to such a shop in a way they would profit from it, I guess.

Costco is set up this way: their optometrists are contractors who get a flat fee per eye exam, and they don't know or care about what else you buy while you're there.

I meant that you can discuss it with your doctor to get their factual knowledge or pointers, and then draw your own conclusions. I didn't say, and didn't mean to say (sorry if it came across like that), that you should follow their advice to any degree. I trust the overwhelming majority of people (doctor or patient) to use their own reasonable judgement, and the rest won't be helped by this advice anyway.

And for what it's worth, you may have had a string of bad doctors. I never had that feeling with any of mine (though I've only ever seen doctors in the Netherlands and Germany).

It's also your age. I kept having stronger and stronger glasses (until -9.5) but then it suddenly stopped and vision stayed at this one point.

This was also what a eye doctor said to me ~20 years ago, although his prediction when it would happen didn't quite match.

Your experience is similar to mine. I got glasses at the age of 13, but didn't like wearing the glasses, so never did. Both my late father and my sister (since she was about 12 years old) have to wear thick glasses. My sister started out about the same eye power as I did, but she wears her glasses everyday. My sister's glasses got thicker year over year, and finally she got LASIK a couple of years ago. My sister doesn't work with computers whereas I spend ~10-12 hours a day with computers/TV screens (when I use computer, I don't wear glasses and my eye doctor told me that's okay). For me, my eye power stayed about the same and never got stronger glass prescription over the last 25 years or so.

Having said that, I started wearing glasses about a year ago when watching the TV between 10pm-12am (thanks to my wife who likes watching movies and I joined in). Turns out, my eyesight (near-sight) got a bit worse in a year and now I have a slightly thicker glasses. Again, this is all anecdotal and maybe age comes into play here with my eye sight (but the common knowledge--not sure how true that is--is that the nearsightedness gets better as people age, so what I'm experiencing is the opposite).

Studies of deliberate undercorrection show a slight acceleration in myopia progression. Myopia progression slows and stops naturally after adolescence, whether you wear the correct prescription lenses or not.

I got myopic in my early thirties. It was annoying, up to that point I was the only one in the family without glasses. Still don’t like to wear them.

The same thing happened to me where I got continually stronger prescriptions, but I stabilized anyways at around 18. My optometrist told me that's very common after adolescence.

I really wouldn't recommend using an incorrect prescription. In the US anyways shops won't let you use a prescription older than 1 year.

That is a trial with N=1

Your eyesight might have stopped getting worse on its own. As is the case for most people (myopia doesn't run away to infinity after all!). Which is why corrective surgery is only indicated after your prescription has been stable for some time.

You're probably just getting old. Normal people get farsighted as they age. Myopic people stop getting worse, or even improve a little, and start developing astigmatism.

Me too.

And to everyone saying "its just age"... well, it doesn't seem that way.

I noticed this pattern and stopped going to the Optometrist for five years. When I finally went again, my myopia was -0.25 worse, so I got new glasses. Then I went again the next year and its -0.25 worse again.

My myopia didn't worsen over a period of five years. Then suddenly worsened over a period of one year.

so I have 2 pairs of glasses, one for clarity at infinity for driving, and another one that's clarity at arms length when I work in the office and staring at monitor all day. I do that because I want my eyes to relax, give it a try!

How do you get stores to use your old prescription? I’ve had no luck with that.

I asked the optometrist. He was a little offended that I wasn't going to use the new measurements but I pleaded with him enough that he relented.

One very interesting thing that convinced me to start doing this: if you get measurements taken at night (vs early in the day), your prescriptions will be stronger as your eyes are already tired. So your new glasses may be too strong for you but your eyes will adapt to it and become worse.

Was this in the US? I’ve tried and everyone told me filling an expired prescription is illegal. Even places that don’t do exams. I have an old prescription and don’t want to get an exam because of the pandemic.

I'm assuming the optometrist wrote a new prescription for the old measurements.

That doesn't make sense.

I'd recommend getting glasses online from Zenni [0]. They just ask for the measurements of the prescription. There's nothing about expiration dates. And they're super inexpensive! Glasses are a racket.

I can't speak for the quality/durability of their frames, as I only used them to get some prescription lenses for my Valve Index so I can play in VR without wearing my glasses.

[0] https://www.zennioptical.com/

An optometrist in Germany told me the same regarding measuring eyes in the morning, for what it's worth. I came in after work and they basically turned me away because they didn't think I'd get a good measurement at that time.

In my experience, wearing glasses that are either too strong _or_ too weak for your myopia will lead to headaches. Lots of headaches.

Some of the online stores especially the ones based in China don't actually check your prescription.

Do you have any recommendations?

I use firmoo, and I haven't had any issues with the lenses. The only tricky thing is that you need to basically estimate the fit based on the dimensions of glasses frames that you already own.

get the best eye test you can, with a prescription. buy cheapo online chinese. zenni optical works fine for me, but with prices from 10 bucks, try several vendors and see which one you personally like.

For a while I could order from the UK, but I think (at least for the shop I used) they changed this to be more restrictive like the US.

It really is annoying due to the difficulty finding a good optometrist who does more than the basics. The entire process is still a matter of closest estimate when you consider that our eyes don't work in exact "steps" along a range. On top of that, the center point of the lens varies a lot based on exactly how a set of frames sits on your particular face. I've had plenty of glasses that were headache city because the IPD was right, but the lens center didn't line up properly with my pupil (vertically, when worn).

Then don't even get me started on the whole Luxottica thing where it can be another pain in the ass to find nice looking frames at many optometrist-attached stores. There are a few others with both optometrists and glasses sales (Warby Parker, if you have one of the brick and mortars nearby, for example).

For someone like me, even the "cheap" stores usually involve an extra $150-200 per set of glasses due to my cruddy eyesight and the need for the highest index lens material. I usually end up bouncing back and forth between somewhere like Warby when I really am due for another exam and will stomach the $200 cost for $20 worth of plastic. If I break or lose my specs too soon after, I tend to just suck it up and roll the dice with one of the cheapie online vendors.

I would not order glasses from a shady chinese site

https://www.optometricsofchatsworth.com/blog/study-finds-saf...

>The study analyzed 200 pairs of glasses that had been ordered from 10 different websites. The lenses were analyzed based on a number of criteria, including measurement of sphere power, cylinder power and axis, add power (if specified), separation of distance of optical centers and center thickness. The AOA reports that in some cases, single vision lenses were delivered instead of the bifocals that had been ordered. In other cases, specific lens treatments were either added to an or were left off.

>>almost half of the eyeglasses tested in the study (the AOA reports the number at 44.8 percent) didn't have the correct prescription strength or presented problems with safety.

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