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Show VISION (These articles are submitted weekly by your Optometrists of .Southern Utah, in cooperation with your local newspaper, in order to better acquaint you with the function and problems of vision). ' WHAT ARE "FUNCTIONAL" GLASSES? Any pair of carefully prescribed, well made spectacles is a scientific marvel. Such glasses correct your near-sight- edness, farsightedness, and astigmatism. They convert poor seeing into good seeing. But today these wonderful general purpose lenses are being supplemented by a striking refinement . . . "functional "function-al glasses." These are special-purpose glasses, designed and built to enable you to get the most from your precious seeing-power. I For example: A piano player may not be able to see the music clearly, thirty inches away, through either segment seg-ment or ordinary bifocals, because one segment is for reading at 15 inches and the other is for far seeing, beyond be-yond 20 feet. What is needed is a pair of functional lenses focused at 30 inches. Functional trifocals (or continuous-vision continuous-vision lenses) are becoming widely used for this condition. condi-tion. , A violinist has to grip his instrument with his chin. But he can't do it if he tilts his head back to look through the lower segment of ordinary bifocals. I A golf player wants to keep his eye on the ball as it sits on the tee, 5M feet from his eyes. He also wants to see it as it wings down thefairway.General-purpose specs often won't do the double job. Target or trap shooting with rifle or shotgun means the eye must see two sights on the barrel and one distant target, all at practically the same instant. ' Many sports lenses should be hardened to minimize breakage, or tinted to reduce glare. Industrial or amateur shop lenses must protect against flying metal, bursting grinding wheels, and chemical splash. In all these cases, functional glasses are indicated for I efficiency and comfort. Actually, such glasses usually look exactly like the ordinary kind, only the lens is ground for a special distance, or is specially placed. Functional glasses do for the mature, aging, or defective defec-tive eye what the young, normal eye does for itself. The I young eye can "adapt" to all kinds of seeing demands the 'older eye cannot. So functional glasses are a means of keeping your eyes "as good as young" in varied seeing situations. |