Beginners guide to Contact lenses

27/11/2023

Beginners Guide to Wearing Contact Lenses

Contact lenses are thin lens placed inside your eyes which provides you better vision. There are mainly two types of contact lenses: soft contact lenses and hard contact lenses. It depends on each patient and their condition where a contact lens consultant decides which to prescribe.

The most important and crucial things to keep in mind when you are a contact lens wearer is the hand hygiene and following the strict cleaning regimen explained by your contact lens consultant and or your Ophthalmologist.

Age:

There is no bar on age factor when it comes to contact lenses, even infants to geriatric population can use them if they are compliant and capable of handling them with care.

In case of infants and children, we teach the parents how to insert and remove and to take care of the lenses.

Types of lenses:

As described above there are mainly 2 types, soft and hard lenses.

Soft lenses are mainly to correct simple refractive errors just like your eyeglasses. Then there are soft cosmetic lenses which are loved by many to enhance the colour of your iris. Even though they are used only for cosmetic purposes strict cleaning regimen and hand hygiene are to be followed.

Another type is the hard lenses which are mainly used in case of conditions like keratoconus, corneal ectasia, or severe dry eyes (i.e., irregular corneas). These have a different set of rules when compared to the soft lenses.

The type of lens is usually decided by the contact lens consultant or Ophthalmologist depending on your needs, your eye condition, and other factors.

Just to sum it up you have plenty of options to choose from.

When to choose contact lens:

Mostly we suggest lenses when the refractive error or power is high and will be difficult to manage with normal eyeglasses. Other benefits of contact lenses over glasses are that they are ideal for people who do a lot of sports and are active, they give a better cosmetic appearance, and is more comfortable than wearing glasses. When you have high power, your eyeglasses may become heavy and may cause some disturbances in your vision too. Contact lenses help a lot in such cases.

In case of infants and children they may not wear glasses properly disrupting their vision and causing more damages to their eyes, but as lenses are worn inside your eyes, they give better vision and no chances of causing any disruption too.

In some other diseases like Keratoconus a type of lens called Scleral lenses or RGP lenses (hard type) gives very clear and sharp vision which would be difficult to achieve with glasses.

Things to take care of:

As mentioned above the most important thing to keep in mind is the hygiene and cleaning regimen of the lenses. Your contact lens consultant would explain the methods of cleaning, storing, and using the lenses safely.