India: Simple magnifying aid

This short article describes the case of an 82-year-old male patient who was referred to my clinic by a retinal surgeon. The patient had untreatable age-related macular degeneration and the surgeon asked whether he might have some help with his near vision. A major concern was that the patient had been forced to close down his small department store as he was no longer able to identify the denomination of any bank notes.

Initial assessment showed the patient to have the following vision:

Focusing on the left, one might predict that around 6x magnification might be required to attempt N6 (because 36/6 = 6). A range of optical aids of varying simplicity were tried and rejected. Surprisingly, the aid that was best accepted by the patient for the desired task was not the one that might have been predicted.