All Aboard For Sharing

Several years ago, when I would babysit for my granddaughter, Savannah, she used to force me to watch Barney videotapes for hours on end. Her favorite tape was “All Aboard For Sharing”. I thought about this recently when I sat down to write my blog about multifocal (bifocal) contact lenses.

Soft multifocal contact lenses are all about sharing pupil space. A soft multifocal contact lens has a reading zone, a distance zone, and usually an intermediate zone, all centered within the pupil of the eye.

This is fundamentally different from a bifocal (lined) lens or a progressive (no-line) lens for your glasses. With glasses, by looking straight ahead, you fill both pupils of the eyes with far (distance) vision rays of light. To fill both pupils with near (reading) rays of light, you need to look down with your eyes and look through the lower portion of the glasses.

By having two independent areas of the lens, glasses are therefore better visually than multifocal contact lenses, which must place both far and near rays of light in the pupil simultaneously.

Glasses, of course, are not perfect. They are literally a “pain in the neck” if you are trying to view a computer screen placed straight ahead of you. You have to tilt your head back to adjust your line of sight so you are looking through a lower point in your lenses to get the proper corrective power in front of your pupil!

Multifocal contact lenses are much better in this situation. By looking straight ahead, the contact lens places the near vision correction on the retina. No head tilting needed!

When my patients come in for their eye exam, I always ask what situations they find themselves in on a daily basis. Glasses are a bit better for certain tasks, such as prolonged reading or long distance night driving, but most patients find (myself included!) they prefer multifocal contact lenses for most everyday tasks.

The next time you go to see your optometrist for your eye care, ask about the possibility of having a contact lens fitting for a multifocal contact lens, and see for yourself why a multifocal contact lens will have you “all aboard for sharing”.

Steven Lutz, OD
Serving Ann Arbor, Saline, Ypsilanti, Pinckney, Milan, Dexter, Chelsea, Brighton, Howell, Whitmore Lake and surrounding areas since 1988.