Soft Bifocal / Multifocal Contact lenses

Multifocal contact lenses have made some great advancements in the past few years, making them more successful at solving your visual needs then ever before.

Bifocal glasses are very successful in allowing both distance and near vision because your eyes turn to look into a different section of the lens depending on what you want to see.  Contact lenses on the other hand move with your eyes and therefore you cannot look into a different section like in ordinary glasses. 

For contact lenses to work they use something called simultaneous vision where both distance and near are in focus at the same time and your brain determines what it wants to focus on.  A good way to understand this is to imagine yourself standing about 2 feet from a screen door – you can choose to look through the screen or look at the individual fibers of the screen.  In this case the screen represents your near vision so when you’re looking far away it is clear, however, not perfectly clear because the screen is still in your way.  With bifocal contact lenses there is a balancing act between distance and near – in general, the better we make your distance the worse the reading is and the better we make the near vision the worse we make the distance.  In the screen comparison, to make the near work clearer it would be like making the screen thicker so it is easier to see, however, now the distance is not as clear because you are looking through a thicker screen.

 Bifocal contact lenses work great to let you see clearly at distance and give you adequate near vision to see your watch, smart phone or magazine print, however, if you need to read very small print such as the back of a medicine bottle, you will need to wear a simple pair of reading glasses.  These lenses will eliminate your dependency on reading glasses 90+% of the time.  If you expect and demand to be able to see very fine print, such as a legal document or medicine bottle, these lenses are not for you.  If seeing without glasses at far and near 90% of the time and having to use reading glasses on 10% sounds exciting to you, then bifocal or multifocal contact lenses are good for you.