Is Your Arm Too Short for Reading?

Next week, our own Dr. Kerry Solomon heads to Hawaii for the Royal Hawaiian Eye Meeting. He’ll join hundreds of doctors, nurses, technicians and administrators for a week of lectures and workshops on the new techniques in ophthalmology. Dr. Solomon will be speaking on a variety of topics, including presbyopia. What’s that? Have you ever seen someone hold a book, restaurant menu or other item at arm’s length to better read it – and sometimes their arm still isn’t long enough for them to see? Jokingly called the “short arm disease,” presbyopia occurs when the eye’s lens gradually loses its elasticity and the ability to change shape so it can see objects close up. Most people begin to notice this loss of reading vision around the age of 40. Bifocals or reading glasses are the traditional prescription for remedying this presbyopic loss of reading vision, but recent technology makes it possible to exchange the inflexible lens for one designed to compensate for changes in the eye and improve functional vision at all distances.