Preventative Eye Care

The prevalence of myopia, or nearsightedness is rising! By 2050, 58% of the US population will be myopic, meaning they will have lost their ability to see 20/20 in the distance. This percentage is up from 42% in 2020, 35% in 2010 and 28% in 2000.

Why is myopia prevalence skyrocketing?

Digital devices!

Whenever you are looking at something up close and not far away, it sends a signal to the eye to grow longer and adapt to be able to see better up close and essentially lose the ability to see far away.

If you don’t use your distance vision, you lose it!

And in the process, our eyes grow longer and stretch out and have an increased risk of sight threatening eye diseases.

The higher the myopia prescription, the higher the risk of eye diseases like retinal detachment, myopia macular degeneration (845x!), open-angle glaucoma, and cataracts. These are diseases that can lead to permanent vision loss.

So how can we prevent myopia?

Spend more time outside!

Studies have shown that spending more time outside looking far away can help slow down or prevent myopia progression.

However, it is often hard in our modern lifestyles to cancel out the effect of all the time we spent indoors looking at a screen with time spent outdoors.

So there have also been many studies on myopia control interventions.

The most effective way I have found of preventing myopia is orthokeratology. Think of it like braces or a retainer for your eyes. They look like a hard contact lens and you wear them at night when you sleep. And when you wake up and take them off, you can see all day without having to wear any glasses or contacts during the day. Personally, I have had progressive myopia since age 8, and orthokeratology has been the most effective in preventing my own myopia, so it is one of my favorite myopia control interventions. I have seen such great success with controlling myopia with orthokeratology that I have all 3 of my kids in orthokeratology in hopes that I can prevent them from ever needing glasses.

Yes, there is a way for us to prevent kids from ever needing glasses!

But not a lot of people know about orthokeratology, or that there are many ways that we can prevent myopia. I want to raise awareness about the skyrocketing prevalence of myopia and educate people that is not normal or acceptable to just sit back and watch as people, especially young kids, progressively lose their distance vision and get higher and higher prescriptions year after year. We can and should prevent this!