What does astigmatism mean and is it harmful?!
Question: What does astigmatism mean and is it harmful?
Answers:
Basically if you have astigmatism it means your eye is rugby ball shaped instead of football shaped.
So you need a lens which has different powers over its surface, as the other post says, to focus light into one place.
More spectacle wearers have it to some degree or another - its perfectly normal.
Your glasses or contact lenses are prescribed to correct your vision but that has no effect on the astigmatism itself. Laser surgery can correct a proportion of astigmatic eyes, but not all of them.
Like short or long sightedness, there are no medications, exercises etc that you can do to correct it - its glasses, lenses or laser surgery.
Dispensing Optician.
Astigmatism is a condition in which light cannot be focused sharply to a point using spherical lenses.
It's not particularly harmful but clear vision cannot be attained if very much astigmatism is present. It can be corrected by lenses with a torric form rather than a spherical form alone. Almost always a lens combining spherical and torric power is used.
An example of a combined torric and spherical surface would be a donut.
Most eyes have a certain amount of astigmatism present.
Optometrist
Astigmatism is not a sight threatening condition, therefore it is not harmful. Astigmatism can be corrected with corrective lenses or surgery (Lasik), but it cannot be improved naturally. Astigmatism occurs when the cornea is shaped more like football then a round baseball (which is the normal shape of the cornea). The oval or oblong shape of the cornea causes light rays to focus on two points in the back of your eye, instead of just one as in an eye with a normally shaped cornea.
Approximately 17% or 45 million people in the USA has some degree of astigmatism so you are among many of us who wear glasses or contact lenses to correct astigmatism.
http://www.allaboutvision.com/conditions… -
http://www.wrongdiagnosis.com/a/astigmat… -
astigmatism usually means: cornea thats not spherical but rather cylindrical.
no, not usually "harmful".
no, cannot usually be "improved" except with a surgical procedure like LASIK
there are other types of astigmatism besides corneal astigmatism...like lenticular astigmatism. but MOST people with astigmatism have the corneal variety
optometrist
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