So You've had your eyes examined and you got your glasses prescription, which looks a
little bit like this, but what happens if you've been told that you've got
astigmatism and your prescription looks more like this? If you've never had
astigmatism explained to you or you're still confused... then in this video I'm
gonna make sure that astigmatism explained in a way that makes sense. I'm
Martin Oguzie and this is Martin's Eye Tips, thank you for joining me. On this
channel we're all about bringing you eye care tips, how-to videos and product reviews
all designed to help you see better, more comfortably and to be less anxious about
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notified every time I release a new video. So let's get started with today's
video which is all about astigmatism. So in this video; in order for astigmatism
to be explained we're going to talk about three key areas, first of all what
is astigmatism, secondly how does astigmatism affect your vision and
thirdly how we prescribe for astigmatism. So I want to start today with my a Peace
Of Mind Point and that is to say that my astigmatism is not a disease and, that's
an important thing for you to beware of because often I see people when they're
first introduced of term astigmatism they concern whether it is a condition
that has sight threatening implications or whether it means that there's
something more serious going on with their sight and with their vision an
actual fact it's a very common condition and a cause for us to say that most
people have some degree of astigmatism it's my experience more unusual to find
somebody who has just a completely spherical eye and prescription with no
astigmatism whatsoever so it's definitely not a disease and definitely
not something you have to panic about so what is astigmatism now to explain that
I'm going to be referring at point to a glasses prescription report so if at any
point you want to understand a bit more about how your glasses prescription
works then please refer to the link up there
and that will take you to a video that I made previously my stigmatism is much
like nearsightedness and farsightedness in that it's an error in the curvature
of the front of your eye the cornea which means that the cornea which is
that first surface on your eye that your breast the contact lens on it now has
two different curvatures a steeper curvature and a flatter curvature
compared to an eye that doesn't have a stigmatism where all the curvatures are
of equal power so rather than being a spherical in shape like half of a beach
ball might be instead because of this difference in curvature at the front of
the eye on the cornea then the eye has more of a shape like a rugby ball unless
basically astigmatism explained in its simplest form the result of this
difference in curvature in two directions is that your eye instead of
having one a uniform focus point at the back of the eye it now has two focus
points at the back of the eye now because in astigmatism we have these two
different focus points this is what causes the problems in vision that we
associate with astigmatism now it's also worth mentioning that you can get
farsightedness and astigmatism in combination as well as nearsightedness
and astigmatism in combination or you can get astigmatism on its own as well
so how does astigmatism affect your vision now many people say that it
can cause blurriness of your vision but in actual fact the key thing with
astigmatism is that it causes distortion and this distortion comes about because
of these two focus points that you have and the further away they are the bigger
astigmatism is and the more distorted things will look to you as well so on
the keyways astigmatism affects your vision is that it distorts straight
lines and this can make texts quite difficult to see so if you're trying to
do read a number plate or if you are doing intricate reading in bed for
example then it could make it difficult to tell one letter from another based on
where your astigmatism lines up with the lines on the letters so this can cause
that confusion have between letters so other than things just look in blurry
astigmatism can bring about distortion which can make fine detail more
difficult. So how do we prescribe lenses for astigmatism so the best way to
explain this is by having a look at a copy of somebody's prescription so that
I would know astigmatism would only require one power that is the same in
all directions on the curvature of the eye on the cornea and that's why when
you look at your prescription you'd have a prescription that looks something like
this with simply one number in the sphere box and that number then could be
a plus or minus depending on whether you're far or near sighted the sill and
the axis boxes would then remain empty now the eye with astigmatism requires
more information and more detail in order to achieve the right lenses to
correct the vision and bring best clarity and sharpness and that's why
when we have a look at the prescription of somebody with the stigmatism we now
require information in the sill box which stands for cylinder and the axis
and these two numbers go hand-in-hand you can think of the cylinder number as
a power or a strength of your astigmatism where as the axis is a
measurement in degrees to inform us about where we want to put that
curvature difference so when we correct astigmatism we need to add the
additional power called the cylinder power or the sill on top of any sphere
that we might have now so we don't end up having a combined power of the sphere
and the cylinder that is correcting equal strength in all directions who
wouldn't actually deal with the curvature difference we then need an
axis the cylinder has an axis which is a direction along which there is zero
cylinder power so that when we combine this cylinder and a sphere then along
the zero power only the power of the sphere comes through that way we've got
a lens that now has the cylinder power in one direction only and also the
combination of whatever's in the cylinder and in the sphere in the other
direction and that's how we deal with a stigmatism now every eye is different
and as a result where the axis needs to be on your eye is different it's never
always in the same place for everybody so for some people it may be at 90
degrees others it may be along and in fact it could be any number
between 0 and 180 degrees now glasses aren't the only way to be
able to correct astigmatism of course you've also got the option of contact
lenses and we have specially made contact lenses that deal with the
curvature differences on the eye as well and these lenses are called Turkic
contact lenses so laser correction is also another option for people with
astigmatism so it doesn't rule you out too like you used to back in the early
days of laser so in fact you can actually get quite high levels of
astigmatism corrected with a laser correction now so and I think powers up
to about six diopters can be a corrected and that's pretty high given that most
people will be comfortably under about four so that's essentially the key
things that you should know about astigmatism so for my tip of the day if
you're somebody who doesn't know whether you've got astigmatism but you've got a
copy of your prescription then I suggest you pull that out and have a look at
that prescription because that will tell you whether you have a stigmatism or not
so have a look for a number in the SIL box and a number in the axis as well so
if you have numbers in those two boxes then yes you have astigmatism if it's a
small amount of astigmatism it may be 0.25 minus 0.25 sometimes it
can be plus as well if it's a large amount of astigmatism then it will be a
number significantly higher than that today's question for you is do you have
astigmatism and if you do what strength is it leave me a message in the comment
section below let me know what strength your astigmatism is and that might be a
number that is a minus 1 - 2 - 3 whatever it may be,
leave a message down there and I'll have a look at that if you want to know more
about your glasses prescription then please check out my video over here and
if you want to find out more about whether you need glasses or not then
please have a look at the playlist listed over here as well until my next
video take care