How to Understand Your Eyeglass Prescription

If your optometrist diagnoses you with a refractive error during your eye exam and you decide you want eyeglasses, you’ll receive a prescription for your new eyewear at your appointment. Your prescription will have a lot of numbers on it, and you may be wondering what they mean. In today’s article, we’ll explain how to understand your eyeglasses prescription.

OD and OS

OD and OS stand for the Latin terms oculus dexter (right eye) and oculus sinister (left eye), respectively. Your prescription may also have a column labeled OU, which stands for oculus uterque (both eyes). On the prescription, the information for the right eye comes before the information for the left eye.

Sphere

Sphere or SPH indicates the lens power needed correct your vision problem. If the number under this heading has a plus sign, then you are farsighted; if it has a minus sign then you are nearsighted. If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to ask your eye doctor.

Cylinder

Cylinder indicates the lens power the optometrist prescribed for astigmatism. If there’s no number in this column then you have little to no astigmatism. The number in the cylinder column may also be preceded by a minus sign or a plus sign. This indicates whether you have nearsighted astigmatism or farsighted astigmatism.

Axis

This describes the lens meridian that contains no cylinder power to correct astigmatism, and it is defined with a number from 1 to 180. If your prescription includes cylinder power, then it must also have an axis value.

Add

If you have presbyopia, then your prescription will include this section, which indicates the added magnifying power that’s applied to the bottom part of multifocal lenses. The number appearing in this section of the prescription is always plus power, even if your eye doctor didn’t write down the plus sign.

Prism

This indicates the amount of prismatic power prescribed to compensate for eye alignment issues. This is measured in prism diopters or p.d. Only a small percentage of eyeglasses prescriptions include a prism heading.

Six One Six Vision Center offers a wide range of beautiful and stylish eyeglasses for our patients. We offer eyeglasses with designer emblems, composite materials, multi-colored inlays and more. Our design experts can help you choose the perfect eyeglasses for your lifestyle, appearance and personal taste. We serve patients from many areas in Idaho including Eagle and Meridian. Call us at (208) 514-1858 to make an appointment. You can also contact us here.

COVID-19

To our Six One Six Vision Center Families,

Our office is fully open to serve your eye care needs. We cannot wait to see you in our office again! With the health and safety of our team and patients at the forefront of our minds, the following changes have taken place while we all do our part to fight this pandemic:

We ask that if you are experiencing a fever, shortness of breathe, or a cough that you reschedule your visit at this time.

We are asking our patients to complete as much of the typical intake paperwork and collecting of insurance information electronically to reduce the amount of team members they need to be exposed to at the office.

We have very strict cleanliness procedures for anyone who comes in to our office at every point of their visit to lower risk of potential infection.

Now more than ever, we need to take care of ourselves, our families, and our communities as best we can, while practicing safe social distancing recommendations. We will get through these difficult times together, and I promise you our office and our team will be here to support you as best we can during these changes, and will be even stronger once we can return to normal care.

Be well, stay strong, take care of each other.

– Six One Six Vision Center Team

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