Vision Test Tips - Remove Anxiety and Get Perfect Prescription Glasses

Vision Test Tips

Remove Anxiety and Get Perfect Prescription Glasses

In this article, my goal is to remove some of the anxiety that you may have when you are getting your eyes checked.  A phoropter is a complex device created to produce a simple solution to bring you back to the world of clear vision.  So in this article, let's focus on… Better 1 or Better 2!

Besides the dreaded puff of air test, the refraction test creates more anxiety than all the other things we do in an eye exam.  I see patients sweating because they are so scared that they will get the wrong prescription because they said something wrong.  Well, I’m here to tell you that 99% of the time, if you get a pair of glasses that you cannot see through or it makes you dizzy or nauseous or give you headaches, it was not because you said 2 instead of 1.  

I’m not showing you how I do the test, but what you will experience during this test.  But I will say that finding a prescription is not like getting measurements from a well calibrated machine.  The results you get from that will be repeatable and reproducible every time you use it.  Pinning down the prescription of eyes is kind of like trying to figure out what note is heard when a frog croaks, as opposed to finding out what note is heard from an electronic keyboard. Even with all the time spent in the exam room and experience of the doctor, the eyes can change it's prescription by a simple change in the wind or change in the body!

I can start this test in 3 ways.  Either I can take your old prescription and put it into the machine and make that better, or I can use an auto-refractor, which is a machine that estimates your prescription, or I can figure out your prescription with a retinoscope, which allows me to see how the light reflects off of the back of your eye, and with that, I can get very close to your prescription.  The reason we ask you the “Better 1 or 2” questions is so we can make sure that you will be comfortable with that prescription.  I’ll tell my patients that the only way we can get this way off is if you lie and try to throw off the prescription, but even then we are trained to be able to catch that too.

I hope this was helpful, and the next time you see your eye doctor, you take this test with confidence and ease.  Don’t forget, just Breath and Blink! 

Written by Dr. Vijay Shenai

True Focus Eye Care

truefocuseyecare.com