Welcome back, [s2Get user_field=”first_name” /]!

Let’s cover some more important basics today.  Namely, how your left and right eye are slightly different from each other.

It’s very likely that your prescription is not the same for the left and for the right eye.  If you had many prescription increases in the past, the risk increased that the gap between your eyes and prescription values increased as well.

This is because of how optometry tends to treat what they perceive as a vision deficiency.

In well over a decade, checking the eyesight of many thousands of clients, I’ve found one thing to be true for certain.  Left and right eye vision is never the same, for anyone.

The role difference between your left and right eyes are still poorly understood by vision science. All that is clear so far is that there is a difference, it’s natural, and we all have it.  One eye tends to change focus faster, see more clearly, and often have other interesting traits, like slightly lower ability to distinguish contrast and color variations.

This, and our two eyes allow our visual cortex to construct a three dimensional spatial reference.

That’s where today’s lesson starts:

Your left and right eye aren’t exactly the same.

The optometrist tries to make them the same, which I found never to have actually helped anyone.

As we will slowly dive into the topic of prescription management, focal planes, getting your eyes to be less strained and your brain less unhappy when trying to process the altered signal, we’ll work on untangling the mess that all those years of prescriptions made.

You want to follow my suggestions closely, rather than “winging it”.  If you look around the forum you find that most accounts where some frustration or challenge in getting improvement is voiced, it almost always goes back to the participant having made up their own process rather than following my suggestions.

This is a very carefully mapped out process, even if I do try to make it simple to follow.  Don’t monkey around with prescriptions!

Our ultimate goal is to simplify your prescription, in small steps, as you reduce it.  We’ll slowly lower astigmatism correction,  and the difference in prescription value between your left and right eye.  We need lots of time for all parts of the system to adjust to these changes.  We want to make educated changes rather than guessing.  That’s where measuring your eyesight comes in, having a bit of a log of past centimeter and Snellen results.

Initially we want to keep changes simple, and just reduce your spherical prescription strength for the most part.  First, the system just has to get used to the fact that you are changing the stimulus.  All ongoing progress happens much more easily when that first transition is smooth.

A little less spherical.  For distance, we’ll try to keep everything else the same.

And we want to keep it the same, in proportion, to your differential prescription.  (aside from astigmatism)  That way, when you put on either pair of glasses, the signal is the same, just the size of the diopter bubble changes.

Operating this way keeps your visual cortex happy, and progress predictable.

All the while you want to appreciate how your left and right eye aren’t the same.  You’ll start to notice that one eye (the one with the higher prescription numbers), tends to be a bit slower.  A bit slower to focus, a bit slower to clear blur and double vision.  You won’t notice this with binocular vision (both eyes), but when you do single eye measurements, it’s there.

That’s normal.  

We don’t want to over or under compensate for this.  We want to simply be aware of it, and keep a bit of a log.  That way you can look back in a few months and see how that gap may be changing.  Eventually we’ll work towards equalizing left and right eye prescriptions, so both eyes can get back to working naturally as they should, even while you still have myopia.

Long story, simple point.  Don’t worry about your focusing muscles, when you notice the one eye responding just a bit more slowly.  No dwelling on it, just log, don’t overthink it, move on.

Action Items

Which one is your dominant eye?

Check those logs!  The lower prescription eye is usually the dominant one.  It sees further, focuses more rapidly, clears blur faster.  What’s the difference in prescription, left vs. right eye?

And if you happen to have your prescription history, go back and see how that gap may have grown in the past.  Everybody starts out under -2 (almost everybody).  Usually there’s about a 0.25 gap in the first prescription, the first step in creating unnatural vision at the optometrist office.

You just want to become aware of this, today.  Know it, and realize that part of what we’ll be working on is getting that gap back to normal over time, which will help with ongoing improvement, and also feel a whole lot better than having an unnatural gap between left and right eye.

More on all of this to come in future sessions.

Questions?  Comments?  I’m always glad to see your posts in the forum!

Cheers,

– Jake

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