top | item 34260585

Ask HN: Did My Eyesight Improve?

3 points| hintoftime | 3 years ago

Ever since I saw this other HN post [1], and this speech on Myopia [2], I've been experimenting with trying to improve my eyesight. Primarily, I've been taking off my glasses when working at the computer throughout the day and placing my monitors so that they just begin to become blurry but are still readable. I also purchased glasses with sphere slightly less than my prescription. I began experimenting shortly after the last visits to the optometrist mid-2022. I went to the optometrist yesterday, and my sphere did decrease in both eyes, but I'm having a difficult time of telling whether my eyesight actually improved since the astigmatism numbers changed as well. Additionally, these are all different optometrists, and I went in the morning this year instead of in the afternoon after working on a computer all day in the previous years. Could you help me interpret this data? Did my eyesight improve?

Contact/Spectacle Rx,Date,Eye,Sphere,Cyl,Axis,BC,DIA Contact,2023-01-04,OD,-1.75,-1.25,30,8.5,14.3 Contact,2023-01-04,OS,-1.50,-1.75,150,8.5,14.3 Spectacle,2023-01-04,OD,-1.75,-1.25,33,, Spectacle,2023-01-04,OS,-1.50,-1.75,152,, Contact,2022-05-03,OD,-2.25,-1.25,30,8.6,14.5 Contact,2022-05-03,OS,-2.00,-1.75,160,8.6,14.5 Spectacle,2022-03-08,OD,-2.00,-1.50,35,, Spectacle,2022-03-08,OS,-2.00,-2.00,160,, Contact,2019-01-11,OD,-1.50,-1.25,30,8.5,14.5 Contact,2019-01-11,OS,-1.75,-1.25,150,8.5,14.5

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31711990 [2]https://youtu.be/x5Efg42-Qn0

4 comments

amalgamated_inc|3 years ago

My (limited) experience with optometrists is that they're a total scam. Went to one, looked in the machine, paid a lot of money for glasses. The glasses immediately gave me headaches. Never wore them again and my eyesight is still 20/10 (somehow one eye is significantly better than the other, but apparently that's not uncommon).

Do you perceive your eyesight to be better?

I honestly think that your own experiments and experience are worth their weight in gold here. Keep on experimenting and don't listen to people reading from textbooks.

sfusato|3 years ago

Matches my experience as well. I mean, if after scanning my eyes with all those shiny machines, you still need to ask me "Is this better? Is this worse?" like 20 times up until I just give up, well, that doesn't feel like a very scientific and foolproof method.