18:21
Admin
As I watched my mother last week attempt to read the message in her birthday card from a distance beyond arm’s reach, I thought to myself how silly it was that she doesn’t wear reading glasses. Despite the obvious truth, she will not admit her eyesight is no longer what it used to be and she needs the assistance of glasses.
I’ve caught her sneaking around in cheap chemist-bought magnifying glasses, but these are next to worthless, not to mention poor-designed and unattractive. The fact is, she’s getting older and needs to visit the dreaded optometrist.
But she’s not alone. Optometrist Bernadette Gilmore says she notices many of her patients who are embarrassed at the thought of getting their eyes checked – but the reality is, their eyes are in need of assistance. Most people, she says, begin to notice a slight deterioration in their eyesight when they hit the age of 40.
“We get a lot of people in our practice who are in their early 40s, saying they have problems. But it’s hard to get people to admit they need glasses – they have trouble taking the next step,” Dr Gilmore says.
Dr Gilmore says many of these people in denial will buy cheap magnifying glasses to solve the problem, which can actually do more harm than good.
“Most people have one eye different to the other – like one eye in focus and one out. The best part of the lens is right in the middle of the lens, so magnifying glasses can often make people’s eye focus too far in or out.”
Dr Gilmore says allowing eyesight problems to continue can result in eyestrain and headaches, due to the patient making their eyes work too hard.
The good news is that many people experiencing problems later in life are most likely just in need of reading glasses – not distance specs. Dr Gilmore says most patients will know if they require distance glasses earlier on in life, such as in their mid-teenage years.
She also says reading glasses are much more fashionable today, with the current most popular choice to be the thicker frames in bold colours.
“A lot of our patients now go for the, ‘if you’ve got it, flaunt it’ approach,” she says.
For those people like my mother and still reading the morning news from an arm’s distance and questioning their need to visit the optometrist, Dr Gilmore’s final advice is to simply, “have your eyes checked. It’s reassuring to know that it happens to everybody. As we get older, so do our eyes and this is a problem that everybody deals with. You’re not alone.”
