I recall an Adam Ruins Everything on that topic…
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It’s pretty easy to get the PD by holding a ruler up to your face and taking a selfie. There are guides online.
At places I’ve gone with my partner, the receptionist usually took that measurement, and wouldn’t do it unless you’re buying glasses, but the optometerist was happy to.
Without fail, their high tech method of obtaining PD was to hold a ruler up to your face, close one eye, say “look at my finger,” squint, say “Uhhhh…” and then write a number or two down. Only the front desk people used the little machine.
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Last check up I asked the OD to measure PD, and she measured far distance and near distance PD differently because of convergence. I’m wondering if people taking selfie based PD are all staring at the camera lens and getting their narrower reading distance PD by accident.
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It’s hugely important, especially after 30, to get tests for glaucoma, macular degeneration, cornea health, and all of the other detailed tests an eye doctor does.
But double-checking their prescription results or doing your own is also very valid. I’ve had some extremely crappy eye exams that consisted of maybe five minutes of the doc putting two or three different lenses in front of my eyes, saying “better? worse? A or B?” and quickly giving me a prescription for $500 glasses that were worse than what I had.
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It’s easier if you have someone work the camera for you so you can focus at the right distance. I’ve helped a few people with this and when we had a prescription to compare to, we got the same result.
Some people are amazingly good at not following instructions though so, you know, YMMV and all that.
BTW someone said above that it’s just about how the glasses fit on your face. That’s not true, PD is about making the lenses’ optical center match your eye’s. Or in other words, it is an important measurement.
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Measuring your PD is insanely simple and most online retailers will send you a little PD ruler that makes it easier. But ultimately you can just look in a mirror and hold a standard metric ruler up to your face. Its just the distance between the center of your pupils in mm.
Nope. Having had some specs with an improper PD its nothing to do with the frame or fit. It has to do with how they grind the lenses, and where the corrective shaping is centered. Basically with an off base PD your eyes will be looking through the wrong part of the lens leading to focus problems, bluriness and head aches.
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I’m pretty sure Yascha Mounk is male; his author bio describes him that way at least.
Make your own!
Lens grinding seems like a harmless hobby, but it’s slippery slope from that to writing treatises on ethics and claiming the unity of all essence.
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Yep; my last eye exam turned up a risk of Acute Angle Closure Glaucoma, a medical emergency if it starts, and it causes irreversible damage if not caught in time. I was able to get to surgeon just as it was starting, and saved my eyesight. Without a professional exam, I wouldn’t have known the warning signs, or that I was at risk.
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I measured my pupillary distance myself because I was going to use an on-line retailer,
then I went to Costo-co to check out their stock; they measured my pupillary distance and I discovered that my own measurement was spot on.
It’s not that hard,
Get a good 30cm steel ruler (don’t worry you need one anyway) hold it up to your eyeballs in good light (the bathroom mirror should work perfectly) and measure the distance from the center of one pupil to the center of the other.
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Oh yeah. When I first got a pair of mail-order glasses, I used a prescription from a year before which didn’t have that measurement. I followed the company’s directions, and was WAY off. By a couple of cm.
THAT pair of glasses didn’t turn out to bad, but the next time I got a 'scrip I thought I’d order an extra mail-order pair. These were progressive trifocals in a small lens. Totally unusable!
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Vision care is ridiculously expensive.
I’ve been getting more and more into astronomy recently and noticed that my phone was picking up a lot more stars than my naked eye.
Last time I went to the optometrist was about 10 years ago and they said a prescription wasn’t likely to be worth it.
I went a couple of weeks back. No vision insurance, but I was genuinely concerned. Turns out I’m too near sighted to legally drive. Got the glasses, contacts, eye exam, and contact fitting. All told it was roughly $1000 USD.
It very much feels like a ripoff, but I also had no idea how much my quality of life had degraded by being near sighted. I didn’t notice how bad it was until I was shown what normal looks like.
I’m happy that I spent $1000 on my vision. I’m not happy it costs so much to get all the stuff and the exam. And it feels especially ridiculous since most of the developed world has this shit already paid for with taxes.
I’m blown away every day by beauty in the world I’d been missing.
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JH wrote:
“Lens grinding seems like a harmless hobby, but it’s slippery slope from that to writing treatises on ethics and claiming the unity of all essence.”
W A I T A M I N U T E !
That’s M Y next book!
Plagiarist!
Pshaw!
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for a correct use of the word biennial in the wild.
Of course, even with the free eye test, you still get the upsell for the actual glasses. And the push to get you onto daily use contacts so they can get recurring monthly payments rather than a new pair of glasses every few years.
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Confession: I had to look it up to make sure I got the right one.
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In the US there’s this incredible requirement for everyone to take personal responsibility for everything. This isn’t about being the consumer it’s about being the provider. The provider is responsible for fronting much of the cost to start this business and offer this service much like you’re responsible for ponying up the dough to pay for your vision care. If the problems of high cost of establishment and operations were somehow solved, the price you pay for lots of stuff would be much cheaper. With a predictable market, like 3/4 US residents are needing glasses, you can re-arrange funding to make it cheaper but you have to be willing to completely destroy (and rebuild) a business and nobody seems to have the power to do that. So … it’s another story about how there’s some weird, no good shit happening, that cannot be solved without addressing some other root cause problem first. Add it to the pile.
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The root cause of high cost in medical care (and vision is definitely medical care, I don’t give a fuck what insurance companies say) is capitalism.
There’s no ethical capitalist way to provide healthcare, full stop. Making a profit on people’s suffering is evil.
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I want to disagree, but Martin Shkreli.
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I recently got an eye exam, and was handed a disclaimer at the door, citing the law that says refraction is exempt from insurance, and Id need to pay $50 for the 5 minutes spent answering, “better or worse?” questions with the fancy looking, ancient steampunk optometry gadget. That thing has got to pay for itself within 10 uses, at that rate.
I am unsuprised that there exists a cell phone powered gizmo that can do the same thing for less than the cost of a single visit. I’ll have to check its results against the prescription I paid so much for.
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i get an annual retinopothy screening because of my type 2 diabetes this is done as part of an overall eye exam which is covered by my health insurance because of the screening. they give me my complete prescription including the pd every year.
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