Do Pinhole Glasses Really Improve Vision?

Those of us that have eyesight issues know how annoying and troublesome they are. Even if we are just dealing with common myopia (near-sightedness) or hyperopia (far-sightedness), most of us will do almost anything we can to fix our eyes permanently. As a result of this common concern, many companies have created and promoted products that they claimed could fix your eyesight permanently throughout the years. These various products have included eyesight exercise programs, at-home heat or light therapies and most recently, pinhole glasses. But do any of these do-it-yourself solutions actually work? 

Let’s take a closer look at the effectiveness of pinhole glasses at improving vision.

Do pinhole glasses work?  The answer to this is both yes and no.

Pinhole glasses can certainly make your eyesight clearer… while you are wearing them. This is due to the way pinhole glasses focus light onto your retina. Your retina, in essence, is like the projection screen from which you see.  Normally, if you have myopia or hyperopia and you aren’t using any corrective lenses or pinhole glasses, the image that gets focused by your lens and cornea gets displayed either too far forward (with near-sightedness) or too far behind (with far-sightedness) of your retina.  This makes whatever you are looking at blurry and unclear.

However, pinhole glasses reduce the amount of light that passes through to your eyes and this causes your pupil to constrict. These conditions cause the image you are looking at to be projected with much more clarity onto the retina. Actually, this phenomenon has been known for quite awhile; it is one of the reasons that squinting (in essence, a type of pinhole) can temporarily give you a clearer image of whatever you are looking at. Some pinhole glasses manufacturers argue that the clearer vision their products give users can become a permanent improvement. They believe that pinhole glasses train your eyes and eye muscles to focus properly again. However, optometrists argue that there is no evidence of this type of permanent vision correction and that clinical trials are necessary in order to verify these claims.

For now, it seems pinhole glasses need to be studied more in-depth to truly determine their ability to correct vision issues. If you have further questions about your eyes such as “Do pinhole glasses work?”, please give us a call at Diamond Vision. It would be our pleasure to help you answer any questions or concerns you have about your vision! For in-person information, visit our Eye Health Center in Atlanta, GA.