How To Read Your Glasses Prescription

Here's a quick rundown of how to read your eyeglasses prescription, so that you can safely create a weaker glasses precription to support your vision training.

I recommended you downgrade from a pair of full strength glasses now to decrease the nearpoint stress on your eyes. It will also encourage your eyes to work harder and focus properly without an overpowering prescription. For more information on this, see How to Create a Weaker Glasses Prescription.

About Rebecca Turner

As a proponent of eye exercises and the author of this website, I'd like to share some of the best natural vision tips I know to help you improve your eyesight. To learn more about how I reduced my prescription read My Story.

Making Sense of Your Eyeglass Prescription

Your prescription may appear to be written in mysterious code but actually once you understand the meaning of the symbols, it will all make sense.

Right Eye and Left Eye Abbreviations

OD - This stands for oculus dexter which is the Latin term for right eye. Not so mysterious now, eh?

OU - Your prescription may or may not contain this one. It stands for oculus uterque which means both eyes.

Note: Some optometrists have updated their prescriptions and done away with these Latin abbreviations. Instead you might see RE (right eye) and LE (left eye).

Lens Powers

Sphere (SPH) - This shows the strength of your glasses, or lens power, measured in diopters (D). A negative (-) sign indicates nearsightedness (in which case you have myopia) while a positive (+) sign or no sign at all indicates farsightedness (hyperopia).

Cylinder (CYL) - This shows the lens power for astigmatism, the condition of having an irrelgular lens shape caused by both nearsightedness and farsightedness. It is measured in plus and minus diopters as above. If the Cylinder field is empty, you have no astigmatism so there is no correction needed.

Axis - This is a number from 1 to 180 which describes the lens meridian that contains no cylinder power to correct astigmatism. If your eyeglass prescription has a Cylinder power, it must also have an Axis value (sometimes preceeded by an x when written in freehand).

Add - This field contains any added magnifying power for people with presbyopia (or aging vision) and is featured in the bottom part of a multifocal lens. As a result, this is always a positive (+) number and is usually the same in both eyes.

Prism - This is for the uncommon occurence of eye alignment problems. It is measured in Prism Diopters (p.d. or a superscript triangle if written freehand).

Base - This refers to the thickest edge of the Prism, which is also the direction towards which the Prism redirects light (up, down, in, or out).

What To Do With Your Glasses Prescription

When your eye exam is finished, your optometrist is legally obligated to give you a copy of your new glasses prescription. That's so you have the choice to either purchase eye glasses from them, or take your prescription to another vendor.

This is very valuable if you are doing vision training. First it means you don't have to buy an expensive pair of glasses from your optometrist (there are so many stores that sell overpriced frames, it is easy to feel ripped off after a visit).

Second, it means that if your optometrist doesn't support vision training (only about 1 in 10 have the qualifications in this area) then you can still get a weaker prescription elsewhere. I recommend buying glasses online at a good quality supplier like 39 Dollar Glasses so you can save money as you go through several pairs of increasingly weaker glasses.

Better Eyesight with Eye Exericses

If you have poor eyesight, then you should know about the power of eye exercises to naturally improve your vision. That's what this website is all about.

With the help of vision training and wearing progressively weaker glasses, I was able to naturally cure my astigmatism and dramatically reduce my nearsightedness which had plagued me for 15 years.

The best way to begin is to find a quality eye exercise course and commit to it daily for several weeks, after which point I am sure you will see a difference in your natural vision. Be sure to get an eye test to verify your results; this is also an excellent motivator to keep going when you know it's working.

I highly recommend the routine I used, called Rebuild Your Vision. It's currently available under a free 30-day trial (only pay when you actually see it works). It's also downloadable so you can begin eye exercises in the next few minutes. This program has a 94% success rate among thousands of customers who decided it was finally time to improve their vision. Now you can do it too - for free!