Trouble With Glasses or Contacts (Refractive Error)

If you can’t fully enjoy your life due to issues with glasses and contact lenses, ask us if corrective eye surgery can provide the freedom and hassle-free vision you want.

What Are Refractive Errors?

Refractive errors are common eye conditions that occur when the shape of your eye means light can’t focus correctly on your retina. This makes objects appear blurry. Common refractive errors include:

Myopia: Nearsightedness
Hyperopia: Farsightedness
Astigmatism: An irregularly shaped cornea or lens
Presbyopia: Age-related vision loss

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How Are Refractive Errors Corrected?

When you’re diagnosed with a refractive error, the default is often a new pair of glasses or contact lenses. However, we have the technology to fix this for most of our Torrance patients, so why subject yourself to what is essentially a prosthetic device? Problems can range from small inconveniences like needing to check in contact lens solution or misplacing your glasses to ruined vacations, serious blinding eye infections or even life endangerment from motor accidents.

Common Problems With Glasses

They aren’t suitable for everyone.

For many people, glasses are a convenient and accessible way to sharpen their blurry vision. However, there are times when glasses can’t correct your issue entirely. This is often the case when your eyesight changes due to age-related problems, for example, if you develop cataracts, glaucoma, and macular degeneration.

Correction can be limited.

With refractive errors like nearsightedness, farsightedness, and astigmatism, the correction possible with glasses may be limited or vision may be distorted, especially peripherally. In these cases, you’ll notice that objects remain blurry, even when you’re wearing your frames.

They can be inconvenient and expensive.

Depending on your lifestyle, relying on glasses for your eyesight can be inconvenient. They are prone to damage and are incompatible with a wide range of activities including watersports, snowsports. If your vision is severely impaired, you may find it difficult to locate your glasses each morning. And finally, they can be a nuisance when you’re running or exercising vigorously.

Common Problems With Contact Lenses

They are expensive

Paying for contacts is like renting your vision versus owning it. The costs quickly add up for the lenses, solutions, exams and time and mental energy spent. See our calculator to see how much they really cost you over the years.

You are more prone to infections and dry eye.

Contacts are a foreign body in the eye that causes microabrasions and hold bacteria and pollutants on the surface of your eye. Even showering with your contacts in can put you at risk for blinding amoeba infections found in our tap water. Less dramatic but insidious disruption to the normal eye ecosystem leads to dry eye and eventual contact lens intolerance for almost all wearers.

You May Be More Prone to Infections

Because you use your fingers to insert and remove your contact lenses each day, you are at risk for increased eye infections. To reduce your risk, it’s important to wash your hands and follow the proper care instructions for your lenses.

Blurred vision or discomfort

Contacts may not fit right or may move, especially contacts that correct astigmatism (toric lenses).

When Glasses and Contacts Aren’t the Right Fit

If you’re tired of relying on contact lenses and glasses to correct your vision, refractive surgery may be a better option. Almost 100% of our patients are able to do their normal activities without glasses or contact after their procedure and the vast majority are able to achieve vision as good or better than with their glasses.

The Benefits of Eye Surgery

Long-term correction of nearsightedness, farsightedness, and astigmatism
Average procedure time is 10-15 minutes
Return to typical activities in 1-2 days
Highly accurate, safe and predictable

Is Eye Surgery Right for You?

For patients who are 18-38 years old, near-sighted with mild to moderate astigmatism who are generally healthy, vision correction surgery is often considered a ‘slam dunk’ with 99% of patients healing as expected.

Patients who are far-sighted, approaching presbyopia age (>39 years old) or have significant eye or general health issues may still have a procedure that can help them. More time and discussion is often needed for these patients to evaluate the best option.

Lifetime Cost of Visual Aids:

$27,000

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Starting Age:

Number of years between purchasing new glasses:

Average cost of prescription glasses and lenses:

$200

Boxes of contacts purchased in a year:

Cost of a box of contact lenses:

$50

Schedule an Appointment

Are you ready to plan your vision correction procedurel? The first step is scheduling an appointment at our Long Beach office with leading eye specialist, Dr. Erica Liu.