the retina, not on the retina, because the cornea bends the rays too much or the eye was stretched too long, the eye is myopic, or nearsighted. To bring this eye into focus, the rays must be diverged (actually, less converged) so that the point of focus is on the retina. When the rays meet or focus in front of the retina, they cross and are diverging when they hit the retina. Instead of a point of light on the retina, they cast a blur circle. When the many points of an image become overlapping blur circles, the image is blurred and fine detail is lost.
How do you know if you are myopic? Most children do not complain about not being able to see distant things. They do not know that they should see them clearly. Infants and small children are concerned with things that are close to them. Many of my young
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Since astigmatism is caused by warping of the cornea, vision will be distorted at all distances. Because this distortion is present all of the time, the patient may not know that things are distorted. Distortion is most obvious when reading print or looking at fixed patterns or objects like door frames, cabinets, etc. Distortion causes difficulty reading random letters, like on the vision testing chart. P’s become R’s or F’s. (There are no Rs on the standard eye chart, but many people see them there.) The letters O, Q, and C are confused with one another. Most people learn that they have astigmatism when they are examined to determine the cause of blurred vision.
Hard contact lenses have a spherical front surface that bends the light. The tears fill in behind the lens obliterating the difference in curvatures, so hard contacts become a new front surface for the eyes and will correct astigmatism in most cases. Soft contact lenses conform to the eye, duplicating the warping of the cornea and therefore do not correct astigmatism well. New designs of soft lenses called toric lenses, can correct limited amounts of