Conventional Soft Contact Lenses continue…
Surprisingly, all soft lenses are classified as drugs by the FDA because of their ability to combine chemically with medications placed in the eye. (Hard lenses do not.) The FDA must approve every new lens or lens modification as well as the solutions used in their care. Unlike hard lenses and their solutions, which have been around long enough to have been standardized, soft lenses have no established standards because the FDA insists that insufficient information still exists that would provide reasonable assurance of their safety and effectiveness. Every type of soft lens now on the market has been tested first on laboratory animals (which are “sacrificed” so their eyes can be removed and thoroughly examined), and then on a minimum of four hundred human “guinea pigs” for six months (whose eyes—thank goodness—are examined in situ). Read the rest of this entry »