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Trouble getting one eye to correct perfectly to 20/20

Tex232

New Member
This question will be in the weeds but if an eye doc or perhaps anyone who’s experienced a similar situation could chime in I’d appreciate it.

I’ve been considering Naval aviation for a while now, but before I pursue it one of the things I’m trying to straighten out is my vision. I’m a little on the older side at 27, and for the past five years I’ve been using glasses for long distance vision off and on. The prescription was never really perfect but since I wasn’t wearing them all the time I never bothered to go get a new one and just made do. My uncorrected vision falls outside the limits for naval aviation, so recently I started getting serious about getting PRK. From my understanding, any laser surgeon relies heavily on a reliable glasses prescription to figure out how much of the cornea to take off. With this in mind, I recently went to an optometrist to get a brand new glasses prescription with the intent of eventually getting PRK.

The doc said I was correctable to 20/20 in both eyes together and separately, and was able to refract me with a much milder prescription than what I had been wearing the past few years. The new lenses were at -1.75 in the right eye and -1.25 diopters in the left with -0.5 diopters of astigmatism correction in both eyes. After getting the new set of glasses and trying them for a week, my left eye was perfect but the right seemed very slightly underpowered. I was certainly 20/20 in my left eye and pretty close in the right but not quite there. Went back to the doc, and after another refraction he agreed and subsequently bumped my right eye up to -2.0 diopters. Now I’ve noticed a little more clarity in the right eye, but I think I am now slightly overcorrected and still have just a slight bit of trouble reading a 20/20 line with my right eye (using a basic eye chart I have at home). I’m close enough to 20/20 in the right eye to where I can usually correctly guess the letter. Heck a few months ago I even was able to pass a flying class 1 with the FAA, but I know how stringent the military aviation eye exams are and I don’t want to have any doubt.

I’m thinking of going back to the optometrist to have him refract me yet again, but I’m wondering what else can be done since he already made the smallest change possible. Part of the problem is the civilian optometrists typically will consider you 20/20 if that is your binocular vision (it is for me), but I know that the military requires 20/20 in both eyes independently. Is there any consensus on whether it’s better to have an overcorrection or an undercorrection, and should I just go back to the -1.75 prescription? I feel like I’m getting slightly better visual acuity with the -2.0 but at the cost of having some minor overcorrection.
 
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