While you are experimenting, I’ll share with you how I am trying to exercise the left eye with the hopes that my vision will improve. I do a lot of online reading. I sit back about three feet from the screen and read online text books, research papers, and so on. I do that with the right eye covered. So I’m reading from my left eye only. After the first few seconds of focusing I find that I clearly see the words and as my reading speed increases I try to sit back further from the computer. I expect that will help my eyes better than glasses or contact lenses.

I have have the same suspicions as you do about glasses/contact lenses. About two weeks ago I had a test to replace my two-year old glasses. I had them for two years. The right lens fell out within a year of wearing the glasses. I kept wearing the glasses with just the one lens over the left eye.

A couple of weeks ago I had my eyes checked and was in shock when I saw that the left eye could barely read the the chart. I had to jump up two lines of letters from the last time I faced an optometrist’s chart. The right eye seemed like it didn’t change at all. I could still read the same line that I read on my checkup two years prior.

I’m so discouraged about the perceived worsening effect of the glasses that I haven’t yet returned to pick up my package from the optometrists office. What I really want is for them to take back their package. This time around I had ordered contact lenses. I know that I’ll never feel confident wearing those things continuously. At least with the glasses, I can put them on when I need them for distance viewing and remove them when I don’t.

One alarming thing about the contacts is that while they allow people to see distance, it messes up their close-up viewing. The optometrist compensates for that error by adjusting the contact lens prescription. This weakness in optometry bothers me. They give me distance vision, but because it messes up my up close viewing, they put added prescription (make it bifocal) to correct their weakness.

I regret ordering contacts and I regret that my previous glasses have only one lens otherwise, I’d stick with the same glasses and only use it sparingly.

I’ve bookmarked this blog, and look forward to seeing the results of this little experiment.