Dry Eyes And Contact Lenses – An Overview

When you begin to lose your eyesight, which happens to most of us at around the age of forty, you have two basic choices: glasses or contact lenses. Both contact lenses and specs have their advantages and disadvantages, so whichever you choose is really a personal decision. However, some individuals have ‘dry eyes’, which means that the tear ducts do not irrigate the eyes as much as normal.

If someone has dry eyes, then wearing glasses will not exacerbate the condition, but if someone with dry eyes chooses to wear contact lenses for personal reasons, the condition can make their lives very uncomfortable.

Some people who wear contacts but have dry eyes will almost certainly experience a discomfort that will lead to the person rubbing their eyes, which will make the condition worse.

There might be medical reasons for the lacrimal ducts not producing enough moisture to lubricate the eyes, but age can be a factor. If you have itchy eyes and are over sixty, it might be in your interests to change from contacts to spectacles.

Some people find it a very hard decision to take. TV personalities and film stars seldom like to be photographed wearing specs. All right, there are not too many of them, but there are hundreds of millions of individuals who look up to their screen idols and copy them blindly.

One of the causes of dry eyes, apart from age or personal illness, is environmental conditions. Pollution affects different crowd in different ways, but tobacco smoke affects most peoples’ eyes, to say nothing of their lungs.

Evaporation is another reason for dry eyes. This sounds strange, because you would think that the water trapped between the eyes and the lenses could not evaporate, but many contact lenses are composed of fifty percent water to make them more flexible and therefore more comfortable.

A warm environment will evaporate water from the lenses and the lenses will endeavor to replenish themselves by sucking water off your eyes – a kind of osmosis. This is a sensible reason for soaking your contact lenses in a solution over night. The solution is there to sterilize the lenses, but it will also permit the lenses to ‘fill up’ again.

Therefore, a possible solution to the difficulty of dry eyes, if evaporation is your difficulty, is to replace your lenses half way through the day. another way of combatting dry eyes if you would like to wear contacts, is to put drops in your eyes each hour.

You can purchase these drops from a chemist in small containers or you can purchase a litre of the solution and refill your droppers yourself. However, a saline solution (salt and water) is just as good as anything and a great deal cheaper.

If none of this works for you then why not just switch to glasses? The trend is to be more open about oneself and part of this trend is to admit your age, wear your wig openly, if that is what you do and be| seen wearing your glasses.

Owen Jones, the author of this piece, writes on several subjects, but is now involved with Designer Spectacles. If you would like to know more, please go over to our website at Spectacles Direct.