Eye care

A Short History of Eye Care—One Heck of a Spectacle!

Anyone who has ever gotten a kick out of monocles (see: Colonel Mustard) might fittingly wonder how great optometric minds innovated eye care solutions. If the fashion staple monocle isn’t a big enough draw, perhaps this is--75% of the adult US population wears prescription eyeglasses or contact lenses. So who got the ball rolling on eye care originally?

The first pair of eyeglasses was invented between 1280 and 1300 Italy—whether it was made by a Dominican friar or Florentine inventor is widely disputed, as the former has an “inventor” credit on his epitaph. These earliest eyeglasses corrected farsightedness, and therefore were only used for reading. Eyeglasses were considered a European novelty item until the 1600s, when the product grew stems to make them tuck behind the ears—thus giving eyeglasses legs. This is the same period (1620) when the glasses were transported to the U.S. colonies, blowing up its market potential.

Benjamin Franklin is commonly mis-credited for creating the first pair of glasses—in truth he created the first pair of bifocal glasses in 1783—which are now available as contact lenses, remedying the condition of presbyopia. However, Franklin’s eye care invention (what he called his “double glasses”) is a testament to his genius—eyeglasses were somewhat rare in the U.S. until John McAllister minted the optometry industry in 1784. McAllister, a friend of Thomas Jefferson, claims in a letter to the 3rd president that he’d already invented such an eye care solution—indeed, correspondence was slow in those days of yore, and the original inventor of “double glasses” could never be recognized. The two John McAllisters (the former Sr. and his Jr. successor) taught new generations of eye care professionals, increasing the span of optometry in the U.S. exponentially and making it far easier—though still a luxury—to obtain glasses in the 19th century.

The Eye Care of Color

What do Sir Isaac Newton and Pink Floyd have in common? Aside from both being heavy, Isaac Newton advanced eye care by studying lenses and discovering that a prism when given light could produce a splash of colors—without his sophisticated definition of white light transforming to a rainbow, our understanding of color may not have given us Pink Floyd’s famed “Dark Side of the Moon” album cover. This prism discovery corresponded with Newton’s experimentation with the anatomy of the eye.

Isaac Newton studied the lens of the eye and once famously poked at his eye with an ice pick—and, in his words, prodding it as deeply towards the back of the eye as he could. What he discovered was that with a pin impaling his eye, he saw different colors of spots (starbursts) in dark and light rooms. He saw the same images in this instance as when he looked at the sun and then looked at a piece of white paper (which you sometimes also experience looking at a white computer monitor…try it now!) His form of D.I.Y. eye care isn’t recommended, but did much to augment how we understand the retina, essentially proving that our perception of color was caused by pressure on the eye.

The New Frontier of Eye Care—Lasers and Beyond!

Lasik eye surgery was approved in the late 1990s and has irreversibly changed the way we see eye care. For some, it’s considered a luxury—most lasik eye care procedures are the price of a small used car at $5,000.

Lasik eye care can cure far-sightedeness (hyperopia), near-sightedness(myopia), and astigmatism. Lasik has not advanced to treat age-related far-sightedness, presbyopia--this is because the age related vision impairment differs so greatly from regular far-sightedness. A regular need for reading glasses is due to a flatness of the cornea—with presbyopia, the same cornea muscle can be weakened, unable to flex and focus on the words on the page, the hand in front of you, etc. For this reason, it’s recommended for those nearing old age to do daily eyeball exercises to keep those corneas strong—focus on a near fixed point and then switch rapidly. One can also alternate eyeball strength by wearing an eyepatch for several weeks.

Lasik eye care procedures may not have the solution to presbyopia, but itcan afford a solution for age-related macular degeneration—new techniques use short intense pulsed light to clean the surface of the eye. This eye care procedure can mean the difference between legal blindness and an infirming elderly life or, alternately, independence.

Would you like to learn more about how lasik can take your eye care problems out of focus? Call the number listed on this screen. 20/20 is just a phone call away and a grateful hindsight just over the horizon! You can also click on the contact form for more eye safety tips…call us today!