Are you over 45 and using spectacle to read this article?
Do you hate your reading glasses?
If so, keep them on and keep reading, help may be at hand!
Unfortunately, the need for reading glasses is a natural progression of aging. The first sign is the fact that you have to hold this newspaper further away to be able to read it, and you also find that you need a good light to be able to see the words clearly. Eventually you run out of arms, and you succumb and buy reading glasses. This means that you have become a slave to your spectacles. Like the Amex card, at your own risk, never leave home without them! Eventually you keep one pair at home, another in the car and another in the office. And your nose gets funny indentations either side of the bridge, where the spectacles settle.
It is important that you understand just why this happens. As you get older, all the ‘elastic’ tissues in your body become less pliable. Knees, lower back, fingers, neck, the list is endless. However, you have to add to that list, the lens in your eye. The fiddly little lens, supplied at birth as a standard feature, does not have a fixed focus, but under your control you can make it focus close up (to read) and then also focus at a distance, such as when you are following your golf ball as it slices into the water hazard. The way you do this is by ‘bending’ the lens to be able to focus on near objects. Unfortunately, as the lens becomes less pliable, the muscles in your eye become unable to bend the stiffening lens enough to produce the near point focus. The near point moves further away, until you have run out of arms, as described previously. We medico’s call this condition ‘Presbyopia’.
Unfortunately, there is yet another result of aging that occurs in the lens of the eye. This is a gradual cloudiness which lowers the visual acuity, slowly lowers your ability to see colors, and eventually brings on blindness. So not only can you not see well enough to read the magazines, but you also begin to lose your distance vision. Welcome to the wonderful world of white sticks and woofing Labrador dogs.
The (partial) answer is IOL’s (Intra-Ocular-Lenses) where we can replace the cloudy hard lens with a clear lens. The patients can see again, but does need reading glasses, as the standard IOL has a fixed focus. So now we come to the latest development in special multi-focal IOL’s. With these lenses you can read your golf scorecard with your near vision, focus on the ball on the tee with your intermediate vision and then using your distance vision watch it gently arcing into the water hazard once more. The procedure is known as SuperSight. (These new IOL’s can improve your sight, but not your golf, I am afraid.)
We also have Dr. Somchai Trakoolshokesatian who practices at the Bangkok Hospital Pattaya, who is the world leader in inserting these new lenses. His figures show a patient satisfaction level after surgery of 99 percent. In medicine, we can never give 100 percent guarantees, but 99 percent represents not bad odds, in anyone’s language.
Now if you are older than 45 years and not happy with your life with spectacles, this SuperSight procedure can bring your vision back to that you had when you were 20. I write from experience, having had the SuperSight procedure in 2016, and I am just delighted with the results. And so will you.
