Ask HN: Did My Eyesight Improve?

3 points by hintoftime 3 years ago | 4 comments

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

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.

hintoftime 3 years ago | | |

My optometrist actually said that finding a prescription that works is more like a wine or chocolate tasting than a precise measurement and giving me a hard time for not being able to decide whether one lens or the other is better.

amalgamated_inc 3 years ago | | |

The Scientific Sales Method:

1. Formulate hypothesis

2. Ask customer "Is this better?" Is yes, you make a sale.

3. "How about now?"

4. Goto 2