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Comment by entee | Hacker News Reader

Just got a postcard from my optometrist the other day saying it’s time for my annual prescription check. My eyes are no different, but my glasses are scratched, so I need to spend an hour or two to get this fixed instead of just reordering glasses online. Can’t wait to use a service like this instead, much faster and easier, good luck!!

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In the US at least, you can order glasses online as long as you know the prescription. It's contacts that require a 'valid' prescription which only lasts a year and they will only let you buy a 'years' worth of contacts at a time.

The rules around this vary state by state. In states like CA, it's unfortunately illegal to sell glasses/contacts to someone with an expired prescription.

More info on buying glasses/contacts: https://www.consumer.ftc.gov/articles/buying-prescription-gl...

That's wild! I'm lucky enough to never having needed glasses, but the country of limited regulation being so captured by the eyewear industry of all things is crazy.

My wife orders hers by dropshipping from possibly China and just enters her measurements from her latest prescription. Is that illegal? Contraband glasses.

I know right!!! Let’s just say “legit” and “contraband” glasses all come from the same handful of factories in Chinese cities such as Danyang and Shenzhen.

From a clinical standpoint, as long as a person has had the same prescription for years and is happy with their vision, things really ought to be that easy.

I'm in WA, and I have to upload a photo of my prescription to buy glasses from a popular online eyeglass vendor whose name rhymes with Warby Parker. My impression is that it's a state-by-state thing. In my opinion it's pretty silly require this for eyeglasses (contacts are a different matter).

Same here in TX. Got a nice bold expiration date on my prescription too, but can't remember if it's one year after I uploaded the picture or one year after the scrip was issued.

I think that there are many scenarios in which there shouldn't be a 1 year expiration date for glasses or contacts. For example, if someone has a very straightforward glasses/contact lens prescription (<2D, no astigmatism) that has not changed in years and if that person has also never had an abnormal eye exam, then there is an argument to be made about having a more open-ended expiration date.

There are two parts to this. One, yeah the optometrist wants your money, sure. You probably don’t need your script checked annually unless you’re old or there’s something serious already known to be wrong with your eyes.

But... Not perceiving a change in your vision doesn’t mean your eyes are healthy - there are all sorts of diseases that a decent optometrist is screening for during an eye exam. Most notably glaucoma, which is irreversible and often presents no symptoms. Your eyes are really really good at working around flaws in your vision, which means that you can feel like you are seeing fine when really your vision is failing. This is what a lot of “check your vision at home” things miss - they can hand you an eyeglass prescription (so long as your vision isn’t too far outside the norm) but they almost never screen for disease, and catching those diseases early can be the difference between seeing and legally blind.

There’s a lot of good stuff to unpack here, and thank you for bringing all of it up!

I’ll highlight the main point, which is that these “check your vision at home” tests never screen for disease. This is 100% true and is one of the biggest issues I have with the “exams” that are currently out there.

There’s a critical element of good vision that exists outside of needing glasses or needing contacts, and that is, are your eyes healthy and functioning well? Are there underlying, silent issues that don’t bother you day to day but may turn into serious problems down the line? All of these are serious considerations that my team and I are thinking through very carefully, and I want to make it quite clear that our end product will at the very least be able to screen for all the major categories of disease (eg diabetic eye disease, AMD, glaucoma, optic neuropathy, etc.)

Hi! This is the perfect use case and one that we keep hearing over and over again from friends/ family/ colleagues/ acquaintances. Really looking forward to helping you out! :)

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