You may be a person that has been wearing glasses for some time or you may realize that your vision needs to be corrected and are considering going to the eye doctor to find out if you can wear contact lenses. If so, take a few minutes to read about how contacts work and how to go about getting them.

A Little History

Contact lenses actually date back into the 19th century if you can believe it. The first ones were made of brown glass and were quite difficult to wear as you might imagine but they were helpful to people with particular eye problems that could not wear eyeglasses. Some significant breakthroughs in the 1940s and 1950s when plastic lenses were introduced. These new contacts were made of a hard plastic called polymethyl methacrylte, which did not allow gas like oxygen to pass through them. The better contact lenses that we have today are rigid gas permeable, which do allow oxygen to easily pass through them. This is important because the cornea of your eye needs oxygen from the air since it does not get oxygen from your blood.

Even in the last few years there have been an increase in technology in contact lenses as lenses are now being made for people with astigmatism and even for people who need bifocal lenses.

Why is it Good to Wear Contacts?

Beside for cosmetic reasons, people wear contact lenses for a variety of other advantages including:

* With contacts, the lens moves as your eye moves, which is different from eyeglasses, which can often distort images.

* Glasses frames can annoyingly block your side vision.

* Contact lenses don’t steam up like glasses do when you go from cold to warm temperatures.

* Some people need different types of lenses for each eye and contact lenses are sometimes the only solution for them.

* An injured cornea can heal faster when its protected by contacts.

So How Do You Get Contact Lenses?

To find out if you can wear contacts, you should go see your eye care professional and get a consultation. You can’t go and order contacts with just a prescription for glasses. It’s a different kind of prescription. When you get your exam, you’ll find it’s pretty simple and does not take very long. You’ll just do some vision testing including the test for Glaucoma, which is an important test to get. It’s just a tiny puff of air that goes into your eye.