As I was sitting there trying to contemplate what to write on, my friend sat there fidgeting with her glasses. She was complaining and wishing she had perfect vision. She then offered to let me try on her glasses and it hurt my eyes. Suddenly I began to wonder if glasses actually make your eyes worse? My friend said she had heard this phrase be repeated multiple times, so I decided to do some digging and try to figure out if glasses were harmful to your vision.
According to this article posted by BBC, there is plenty of research on children and reading glasses. It basically concluded that it is better to give children reading glasses at young age, it they need them. However, it goes on to say that it is difficult to find any on adults and the affect on their eyesight. I have to say, they were right. I found it very difficult to find studies proving, or disproving, this question. However I did find more articles. THIS article states that the glasses aren’t making your eyesight worse. Instead you are simply so used to having the glasses improve your vision, that not wearing them intensifies the inability to see. This sounds pretty plausible to me. I don’t see how wearing glasses, tools that are there to improve your eyesight, could actually make your eyes worse
Now even with some intense research and extensive searching for scholarly articles, it was hard to find any sufficient evidence to answer this question. So, I can conclude that most likely glasses do not make your eyesight worse, or else they would be off the market, and there would be more studies done to answer this question. There is also a chance that this topic could be suffering from the file drawer problem. It very well could be that people have continued to get negative results, or results they do not wish to share, and therefore no studies have been published. This would be my best guess. However, I have also decided to design my own experiment for this topic:
I would take as large of a sample of people who are about to get glasses, but have not yet purchased their first pair. Then I would do a simple eye test on all of the participants, before giving them their first pair of glasses. I realize that there could be many confounding variables in an experiment like this, but I would do my best to control them. I would ensure that the people wore their glasses everyday and that they recorded when they took them off. Also, I would have people quit the study if they failed to abide to the rules of the experiment. Then after three years,I would have them take their glasses off for a few hours, and then test their eyesight again. This would show me whether or not their eyes were actually damaged by wearing the glasses.
In conclusion, I still don’t believe that glasses can be harmful and make your eyes worse. I really think it has to do with the type of prescription you wear and the time it takes for your eyes to adjust to the new circumstances. I hope in the future, there are more studies done, and we come to a better conclusion for those who have to wear glasses.
I find this very interesting considering the fact that I do wear glasses. I never needed glasses until freshman year when I failed an eye exam I never really knew I needed them I just figured nobody could see the stuff I couldn’t see. But I wore that pair of glasses for 2 years and then I needed to get a new pair, a higher prescription because my eyes got worse. This is just one instance and Im not really sure why they got worse if it was due to the glasses or some other confounding variable. I attached an article that shows how corrective lenses actually work . http://science.howstuffworks.com/innovation/everyday-innovations/lens.htm