How good a solution to reading glasses is Laser Eye Surgery?

Do you sometimes feel like you’d do anything to free yourself from those irritating rims that always seem to disappear or break?

Even the inconvenience of having to find them every time you need to read something is enough to make you cry out in frustration and throw them as far as the eye can see.

But, usually just as quickly as the feeling arises, it settles, and you continue getting on with the rest of your day. That is at least until it happens again a few minutes or hours later.

This cycle repeats throughout the course of a day, 7 days a week, every day of the month, 365 days a year. From this meta-view you can begin to see the cumulative effects that reading glasses can have on your stress levels. They’re not only the cause of little grievances like struggling to read the paper or decipher product labels when shopping, they’re a source of long-term disruption to your health and quality of life.

It’s unfortunate that this realisation doesn’t normally come until after several years or decades of glasses use when the option of freeing yourself from reading glasses is all but a distant dream that faded long ago.

But this isn’t the path you’re heading down — even by reading this article you’re taking a huge step closer to glasses-free vision and the freedom to live once again through youthful eyes.

So let’s dive right in and find out how Laser Eye Surgery compares to your beloved spectacles.

PRESBYOND® Laser Blended Vision: The 21st century alternative to reading glasses

Presbyopia is the medical term for the loss of near vision that everyone experiences as they get older. Setting in around the mid-forties, presbyopia occurs when the lens in the eye becomes less flexible and the muscles that pull it into focus become less powerful. The result is a slowly declining ability to change focus and see objects up close. Conventional reading glasses — like those you find in most supermarkets — are a common and temporary way to compensate for presbyopia.

Bifocal glasses work much like regular glasses, yet with a portion of the lens angled especially for the near visual field. They are not a long-term solution that corrects presbyopia but rather tools or aids you can use for temporary relief as you need it.

There are more sophisticated eyewear options, such as Monovision, that can more accurately correct presbyopia. Monovision works by making one eye focus on objects up close and one eye focus on those in the distance. It can be achieved with glasses, contact lenses, intraocular lenses, or older versions of Laser Eye Surgery.

PRESBYOND® Laser Blended Vision, the latest Laser Eye Surgery treatment for presbyopia, is considered by experts as the most effective way to alleviate its symptoms. It works in a similar way to Monovision, adjusting one eye to work up close, and at intermediate distance, and the other to work at a distance and at intermediate distance. The difference is PRESBYOND® Laser Blended Vision does this not by using external lenses or implanting them directly into the eye, but by correcting your refractive error. In this way, the treatment is more effective, easier to adapt to, and much safer than alternative solutions.

What’s more, the suitability rate for PRESBYOND® Laser Blended Vision is considerably higher than Monovision — around 97 percent of people are suitable for the treatment, in comparison to Monovision which is suitable for only around 60 percent.

To get an idea of what results you can expect from PRESBYOND® Laser Blended Vision, here are two stats from our clinic on Harley Street, London:

• Over 98% of PRESBYOND® Laser Blended Vision patients can read normal newsprint (‘N8’).
• Over 90% of PRESBYOND® Laser Blended Vision patients can read the small print on medicine bottle inserts (‘N5’).

As nothing can stop presbyopia developing over time, your ability to adjust to vision at various distances will continue to decrease. However, the vast majority of patients treated with blended vision retain sufficient reading vision to last them the rest of their lives.

If you’re still thinking you’d prefer to put up with the woes of reading glasses, consider the many celebs and ophthalmic surgeons that swear by PRESBYOND® Laser Blended Vision.

Even if you’re undecided, one thing is for sure: There’ll never be a better time to have Laser Eye Surgery than now. The longer you wait, the more time living free from the limits of glasses you lose.

Have a question about the symptoms or treatments of presbyopia? Ask us in the comments below. Or if you’d like to book a consultation with us, give us a call us on 020 7224 1005.