Couple of months ago I was inspired by a post called "Making my own glasses" (https://www.eidel.io/2019/04/24/making-my-own-glasses/) where the author goes to different optometrists to get different measurements of his eyes for medical certification for a pilot license. In the end, he buys a set of trial lenses and trial frames to measure the best parameters for eye glasses and he buys one.
I decided to buy trail lenses and a frame too. My motivation stemmed from the left lens on my new eyeglasses seeming to have the wrong parameters. Wearing them made my queazy after a month since the difference is subtle. I figured the optometrist got it wrong and must have changed the prescription from last time as my old glasses fit me super well. No queaziness. Maybe the eye doctor's assistant gave the wrong left eye parameter to the store I ordered from or they heard it wrong. I dunno. I got the old and new parameters so I could test them against the old and new glasses.
When I did receive the trial lenses and frame, I started playing around with spherical diopters then added some cylinders. I went to uncomfortable positive (black lenses) and then to more comfortable negative (red lenses). Super fun to play around, but that was short. I held in my hand a prescription from 2010 and entered those parameters into the trial frame. First with spherical then cylinder and finally axis. Wasn't too bad. It was weird having a cylinder at -2.25. Never again. I did take note that the spherical parameter of -3.50 was just fine and not sure why it increased since then. I tried my current prescription parameters and compared against the new glasses and could clearly see that the left side was incorrect. Guess I will never order from Eyeconic again! (Update: They did accept a prescription redo to fix the lenses, so I guess was too quick to say "never")
Well, I remember seeing a site called EndMyopia and visited it recently. Author talks about active focus and blah. One thing that he said was that eye doctors tend to give worst case parameters, so that explains my current prescription. The author also exclaims that lowering your prescription could help you with lowering your Myopia since it is just stimulus. Who doesn't want to lower their myopia or be glasses free!
With that in mind, I decided to get cheap glasses with different parameters where I could have lower spherical for computer and enough spherical/cylinder for outside walking. Time for measurement, I try to go from spherical of -1 in steps of -1 to see which gives me good eye sight without cylinders. -4 seemed like too much, so I went back to -3 and went in steps of 0.25 until I felt comfortable in front of my computer then I would look at the Snellen chart to see how good or bad the parameter was. I settled on -3.25 for computer reading. Afterwards, I added some cylinders and tried different axis parameters to see if I could keep it at -3.25, but yeah the chart line for 20/20 was too blurry. I step up the spherical by -0.25 while trying < -1 cylinders. Settled on -0.75 cyl.
Now the question was where to order from.... EndMyopia mentioned Zennioptical, so that's where I ended up ordering from. I did look at prices in other shops and felt Zenni was very cheap so I could have glasses outside of my eye doctor prescription. That's where I am currently at, just waiting for the order.
I'm excited about the prospect of not relying on eye doctors to prescribe me some glasses. Taking control of one part of my body even though I have to do a little more work. I'll report more when I have the glasses and have worn them for at least a month.
Resources
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j48PMpFKxBo - Lecture that shows trial lens and frame usage
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PoIL6Mk3NMs - Cross Eye Cylinder to measure cylinders