Contact Lenses Care

These are the questions asked most frequently by my patients. If you have any others, consult your contact lens specialist.

Q: Can the eye become dependent on contact lenses?

A: No. Wearing contact lenses neither improves nor worsens vision. The only “dependence” is a psychological one. The excellent vision correction provided, the convenience, and the improvement of one’s appearance make many wearers contact lens “addicts.”

Q: Why is my vision blurry while wearing eyeglasses after I remove my contact lenses?

A: This condition is called spectacle blur. It usually occurs with hard lenses and is due to corneal molding. The cornea is pliable and its shape is changed slightly by the contact lens, much as the skin of your finger becomes indented by a ring. Just as the indentation on your finger disappears after the ring is removed, your cornea gradually assumes its original shape. In the meantime you have an irregularly curved cornea causing a kind of “induced astigmatism,” for which your spectacles were not ground to correct. As a result of this temporary and artificial refractive error your vision is slightly blurry when you switch to spectacles. This situation may last from a few minutes to a few hours.

Q: Why do I see differently when I switch back to glasses?

A: See discussion of spectacle blur. Also this difference in vision may be due to the fact that spectacles for nearsightedness reduce the size of objects and those for farsightedness magnify objects (especially for aphakics, who are very farsighted). With contact lenses there is no such effect. When you switch from contacts to glasses, your brain becomes momentarily confused and interprets the smaller or larger image as blurry. Again this phenomenon is fleeting and only mildly annoying if you wear contacts most of your waking hours. Should you decide to return to full-time spectacle wear, your brain will adapt to this different way of seeing in a short period of time.

Q: Why can’t I use saliva to clean contact lenses?

A: Though the composition of saliva makes it a very efficacious wetting solution for hard lenses, it is absolutely unacceptable to use it for this purpose. Saliva contains bacteria (and possibly viruses and fungi) that are safe for the mouth, but dangerous for the eye.

Q: Can I use hard contact lens solutions for soft lenses and vice versa?

A: Absolutely not. These solutions were designed for specific types of plastic. Because hard lenses and soft lenses have very different properties, their accompanying solutions contain different ingredients. In addition soft lenses will absorb the chemicals in the hard-lens solutions; these chemicals can later be released into the eye, possibly causing irritation or ocular damage.

Q: Can contact lenses be used in sports?

A: The bony structure (orbit) that forms the eye socket was designed to protect you from injury, and it does its job extremely well. But if you’re very active in sports, for instance, hard lenses may pose problems. If you are hit directly in the eye with a racquet ball, wearing a hard contact might result in greater ocular injury than if you were not wearing lenses. That a contact lens would shatter, however, is highly unlikely: the plastic from which it is made requires the force of a hammer striking it on a cement surface in order to break it. Of course, soft lenses are safer. In some instances a contact lens can actually act as a barrier and shield the eye from scratches. However, for contact sports and racquet sports you should wear special protective glasses, goggles, or masks, whether you wear contact lenses or not.

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