About monovision problems

What is Monovision?

Monovision is a therapy for people who suffer from presbyopia. Presbyopia is an eyesight problem where our eye crystalline lenses lose their elasticity due to our old age, thus disabling us the capability to visually focus on objects close to us. This mainly means that people with presbyopia will have difficulties reading, and focusing your eyesight upon near objects. The most common therapy for this condition is called monovision and it involves glasses where the lens on one eye enables looking at a distance while the lens on the other one makes it possible for us to concentrate on near objects. Naturally, wearing two different lenses can be hard at the beginning, until the patent gets used to it. During this time, numerous problems can take place.

Monovision Explained

As it is the case with most of our organs and body parts which come in pairs, one of our eyes is dominant. This, dominant eye, is in charge for looking into distance. Thus, once our near vision gets affected negatively, this is mostly due to the deterioration of our other eye, which is in charge of these processes. Then, the focusing lens is placed on that, non-dominant, eye, making it possible for us to look in the distance with our dominant one and still focus on near things with the other eye. Moreover, if we need to boost our dominant eye, we can place corrective contact lenses on our dominant eye, boosting our focus in this respect, by teaching our brain how to should this look like.

Since most of these things can be corrected by wearing these lenses, laser surgery is often the last choice, since it is permanent and cannot be modified later.

Problems with Monovision

Logically, once a person gets exposed to monovision treatment, his/her eyesight will be affected, since, before, his/her eyes worked in concordance, adjusting together whatever they needed. Now, after this process, each eye has a different function, which can cause blurry vision or perception issues until our brain learns how to cope with it.

Therefore, monovision can cause problems in reading, diminishing eyesight sharpness. Also, your eyes will be affected by glares in the darkness, making driving a car potentially dangerous, especially during the night.

Blurring is also quite a common problem with monovision, since there are distances which, once observed, due to the nature of this therapy, get blurry. Still, there are only about 15% of people who do not manage to adapt to monovision, while most of the people do fine.