I helped a patient today who hadn’t been to see an eye doctor in many many years.  She focused on helping her daughter get care, and felt the drugstore readers were getting her by ok.  

She’d had trouble with progressives in the past and also suffers from occasional vertigo. I felt pretty confident I could fit her in a modern progressive which she could wear comfortably, but the reality of her computer workstation was going to cause problems.  

Instead of forcing the issue I considered her comfort and work function as the primary concerns and fit her with a computer progressive. 

For those of you who don’t know, there are hundreds of progressive designs on the market.  Each with their own advantages and disadvantages–partly based on prescription, visual needs, and price.  Computer progressives are a smaller subset which creates the largest visual zone in the midrange, or at arms length. This lens approach can allow not only for the intermediate to be a larger zone, by width, but also for better control of the vertical placement. 

Computer progressives can be incredibly useful for those spending large amounts of time in the midrange but they do not work well when full distance is important to correct, i. e. You can’t drive in them. 

So, your take away here, make sure you have a conversation with your Optician about what visual distance is most critical for you to see clearly.