Bill Harvey: I could be right

‘You’ve got to accentuate the positive,’ sang Aretha Franklin in 1962, so staking her claim to be well qualified for fitting multifocal contact lenses.

As a successful wearer of multifocals for some years now, with comfortable binocular 6/4 and N5 acuity, I am always surprised to hear of colleagues who still consider monovision appropriate as the first choice for presbyopes. Or to meet patients who had been deterred from trying multifocals by ECPs who introduce the lenses with a barrage of ‘you may find that your vision is not so good’ challenges.

So, it was refreshing to hear one speaker during the recent and excellent CooperVision Perspectives online conference offering a different approach. When discussing presbyopia correction in future, suggested the always perceptive Professor Lyndon Jones, why not begin by describing the challenges presented by spectacle correction? Multifocals suddenly seem a much more attractive option. I wish I had thought of that.