After years of the struggle to find a way of curing short sightedness, scientists in Australia are in the early stages of research which will control the progression of defects in the short sighted eye! So can we finally throw away our specs, contact lenses and the thought of laser surgery forever?

An eye is short sighted because the eyeball, from back to front, is the wrong length, and light isn’t focussed correctly, so what we see is blurred. Specs and contact lenses re-focus the light so that if falls in the correct place and we see clearly. Laser surgery works by altering the curve of the front of the eye, so that light is focussed properly, but it’s a pretty drastic solution!

The Australian researchers have been working on spectacle lenses which play with peripheral vision. (That’s what we see around the edges!) They are working on creating lenses that work differently to standard spectacle lenses to control our short sightedness and stop it progressing. There have been many suggestions through the years to alter the length of the eye, and to understand why myopia occurs. The social stigma of wearing glasses and the sheer inconvenience of specs will always drive us forward in trying to correct visual defects by more permanent methods. There are already techniques such Orthokeratology, where you wear specially prescribed contact lenses at night to reverse myopia.

So even if we’re presently hanging onto our specs and contact lenses, there may be hope for the future, if the researchers are far sighted enough!