Does this mean you could replicate the effect with brighter lighting? I was hoping for something that would actually make the lens more flexible.
... maybe you should be using it then? (Sorry... but not sorry.)
"Gentle" or not, is this actually safe for long-term use? Your pupil dilates in indoor light for a reason, I'm not sure if it's a good idea to fight that. You'd be better off just increasing ambient light levels to match sunlight.
I just assumed more photons results in a stronger signal to my rods and cones. But maybe it's making my eye shrink the aperture instead (or both).
Another way to look at that: We likely evolved decent color vision to identify edible fruits. That wasn't doable with vision in the dark (and we opted out of the olfactory tech tree), so now your accurate-vision tasks are optimized for daylight.
There's obviously bound to be 'medical' and comfort reasons over disposable ones beyond the disposable society, but the cynic in me can't help but feel that research into longer-lasting more-comfortable reusable contacts would be taken through to market in preference to a more profitable cheaper-made daily product.
- don't accumulate gunk over days/weeks/months that can cause injury and/or infection
- are cheap to replace if torn or lost (which happens with tiny transparent things)
- are made from softer, thinner material (because it doesn't need to last) which is way more comfortable
Permanent lenses had also led to some blood vessel overgrowth due to lack of oxygenation.
Using a new pair everyday does make quite a few tricky problems go away downside being slight extra cost and extra plastic pollution.
FWIW, this no longer appears to be the case. New "extended-wear" contacts have excellent oxygen permeability, and my ophthalmologist hasn't noticed any overgrowth of capillaries/vessels over the past 15 years of me wearing them. You can also sleep in them now, and I find them more comfortable than dailies actually, due to their high permeability.
Meanwhile on the monthly side of things, contacts that are approved for "extended wear" have enough oxygen permeability to be worn overnight now. Ten years ago, this was for up to 7-14 days (Biofinity), now they are up to 30 days (Air Optix Night & Day). This also greatly reduces the chance of infection (because you're not handling the contact 60 times per month) and is just super convenient because it's nice only having to touch your eye 12 times per year - you largely forget you're even shortsighted at all because you can see clearly from the moment you wake up till the moment you fall asleep every single day.
If anything, I'd argue that the monthly ones are the "scam" pricing, not the daily ones. They're priced just about the same per year, but the manufacturing costs must be significantly lower when you're only consuming 1/30th the number of units.
Regardless, the market appears to support ongoing R&D for both strategies.
Does anyone know the reason that data is published after approval rather than before? Seems illogical at face value, but I'm obviously missing something.
Correct. When liabilities grow too big, the company will spin off the liabilities to a shell company without means to pay for damages caused. (this is called a "Texas two-step" bankruptcy)
Of course not. Side effects ? Which side effects ? /s
But instead of doing that you’ve decided to just write this comment instead and post something that looks quite silly for those that have taken the first approach.
The numerous “not approved” decisions makes that plainly obvious. Not to mention all the times FDA has said “you have to do X to get approved” and the company happily complies despite it delaying sales by several quarters.
To the question at hand “why do publications come after FDA approval”, the FDA has access to all the data (actually more) before publication, so the publication is irrelevant to approval.
The company happily complies?
Or just does it begrudgingly because not doing it delays sales a few more quarters if not indefinitely?
I'm not sure where you're getting the idea from that a company would happily do anything additional. It's a cost of doing business. Let's not pretend they're angels, they're in it for the money not the greater good.
And if that last statement needs a rationale, tell me who is doing the work to find the next antibiotic or any other non chronic disease medication
Even if the cost of the change are very high, getting it approved is probably worthwhile. To say that they would do so happily implies that there's a motive beyond getting approval.
Based on these comments, maybe my interpretation was just off
[1]https://www.fda.gov/science-research/science-and-research-sp...
If only the Democrats had been in power in that period. And if only lobbying weren't something that was impossible to prevent by a neutral third party paid for by taxes to do exactly that.
The fda budget much like every other agency has grown incredibly in the last 50 years ( <1bnin 1992 to >6bn today). You can look at more recent numbers and see it’s still rising. When you hear cuts I’m spending it’s often cuts in proposed increases in spending which are often double digits. So you can grow an agency 10% a year for decades and then a single slow down or reversion to levels from just a year or two ago is seen as drastic cuts that will result in poison into our water.
It varies a little by division/subject matter, but they basically have to run everything by industry and are subject to FOIAs and public shaming by senators and representatives beholden to industry.
Source: long-term partner of FDA employee, though this stuff is pretty widely understood.
How is that relevant?
The funny thing about short answers is that they're often partly or wholly full of shit and don't describe the underlying reality. For example, see how different things get when you look at actual information instead of pulling ideological talking points out of your ass without knowing what the hell is even the case? (A common thing on this site among so many self-described highly intelligent people)
This is the FDA's actual funding history over the last 3 decades (page 6 of the PDF), showing a steadily increasing budget across both Republican and Democrat admins. Curiously, some of its bigger budget increases coincided with the first Trump administration even. https://sgp.fas.org/crs/misc/R44576.pdf
Once the pivotal trial reads out, companies usually submit within a month or two to the FDA. Much of the submission dossier (trial design, product description) can be written ahead of time, so it’s really the results that need to be drafted.
The FDA can approve in as little as 3-4 months for an accelerated approval, but it can take up to 12 months.
Compare that with a paper being written and reviewed across multiple authors (3-6 months if you’re lucky), then submitting to multiple journals for review and feedback (6 months), then final submission and peer review (1-2 months), then any additional edits (1 month), then final slating for publication after article is type set, all figures are sized, article laid out and final version (1-2 months).
So all in the FDA takes less time (3-12 months) than publishing (12-17 months).
I don't really understand eyes or optics though, I'm just guessing based on my layman's understanding of focussing a camera, so take this with a pinch of salt!
It comes with the same downside: reading in low light is difficult.
For pinhole intraocular lenses these are implanted in just one eye for the same reason.
I imagine this product would be used in just one eye at a time.
The dosage instructions say to use it in both eyes
https://www.accessdata.fda.gov/drugsatfda_docs/label/2025/21...
It's plausible that making things sharper at the expense of making them appear dimmer would be a good trade for some people sometimes. And you don't have voluntary control over your pupil so this medication could help. But it seems like it would have very limited applicability.
Anyone got experience/comments on that? (Presumably one could replicate it with contact lenses, in particular.)
My depth cohesion barely functions to begin with as a result of one eye being a legally-blind blur past three feet until I was 18, but I can confirm that once you have depth perception, it isn’t going to fail you just for a slight shift in focal efforts.
IIRC they did actually require that he wear contact lenses that replicated the effect for some amount of time (a month or so I believe) because there are people who are not happy with the arrangement. So they sort of force you to try before you buy.
That said, I've heard a fair number of people hate it and I get that.
Its major advantage over LASIK is reversibility. (Also lower incidence of dry eyes, a shorter healing time, no reduced night vision and UV protection for your retina if you’re outdoors a lot.) The major downside is it’s a bit more expensive.
[1] https://www.presbyopiaphysician.com/issues/2023/december/evo...
Thanks to an ophthalmologist with flexible practices, I'd later also managed to get some variety in my contacts - a bit higher power for sailing, where extreme long distance sight is helpful.
For activities which require precise stereo vision and/or maximum fine detail (soldering, foosball, skiing, sailing, etc) I prefer two contacts (or none, in the case of soldering). For general daily life I still enjoy one contact - my brain will use the picture from the uncorrected eye for close-up stuff, including computing, and the corrected picture for farther things, like driving. It's not perfect; I have to turn my head a lot more in one direction to check for traffic/etc and sometimes objects in the foreground create a large block of blurry vision.
But it's quite nice for daily life where I constantly switch from activities which are close (computers/reading) to far (everything else).
Like 'heikkilevanto, I may have to go back to stereo vision soon - my eyes are reaching the age where they're not as quick to focus and I don't see as much detail. Close-up work is getting much more difficult with just one eye. I can no longer solder at all with mono-vision, depth perception now only works for longer distances and not shorter ones. And far-vision is losing detail, so having two contacts makes it much easier to ascertain what I'm seeing faster because the detail from one eye fills in blurry spots of the other.
Some people have said that correcting vision prevents the eye from adapting and fixing itself to see better again. I haven't found this to be true. Contacts stay in my right eye better and tend to fall out of my left eye more frequently, so for the past decade I've almost always corrected in that eye and uncorrected in my left. My prescription for both eyes has not changed at all in the past decade - for me there seems to be no long-term change, good or bad, caused by correcting my vision.
I also wear contacts that you can keep in 24 hrs/day for 2-4 weeks, and have not seen any damage over the past 15 years of sleeping in my contacts for up to a month straight. I have annual "digital retinal exams" going back 15 years which can see the types of damage that are caused by sleeping in contacts too much (capillary growth due to lower oxygen, calcium deposits, etc) and there doesn't seem to be anything to note, as well as no significant difference between my right and left eye.
You can order one-eye reading glasses without a prescription online for use on top of contacts, fwiw - might give you a way to correct for closeup work, so long as you have a matched pair of L/0 and 0/R.
Actually you can simulate it just by holding the current pair to one side. Kind of works but is a bit annoying compared to normal reading glass useage.
Opioids can cause contraction, but probably not what you were thinking of?
Maybe it’s different in other places but over here a “junkie” specifically refers to a heroin or other opioid addict not a general drug user.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/doge-reportedly-fired-fda-employe...
There are many articles about that.
there was a 20% headcount reduction, down to a very meager 15,000 people. you dont believe the FDA can properly function with 15,000 employees?
Mainly it is the people who left and were fired. The brightest would jump ship instantly when DOGE started firing, and these scientists had lots of places to go. And the people fired probably had a lot of expertise. I have seen similar happen many times in computer science over the last 40+ years in the business. Once a company starts firing, the smartest people jumps ship.
But yes, I cannot trust the FDA anymore because the people still there will be too scared to push real science. They may taint their results even without doing it on purpose due to that fear.
The same is starting to happen in medial research, but seems that is getting more press. Trump/Kennedy just handed all the US future medical advancement directly to China, and I am sure more will come. Where do you think these bio researchers will go ? China will hire them and maybe even set up a shell corp. for them in the US so they do not have to relocate. Just the knowledge and patents will be sent to China.
https://www.comicsands.com/rfk-jr-mrna-contracts
So Trump and friends is destroying the US right in front of everyone here.
I (and others) make this comment on HN from time to time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38794682 - hopefully it helps others.
There's all sorts of discussion online and it's a pretty heated topic, flamewars, paid courses, forums, some people say it can only prevent it, some say it can reverse it, some say it does nothing, some will ban you for talking about it, etc. Then there is the even more controversial theory that you can recover from serious myopia with the "reduced lens" method. The popular opinion is that that's impossible, but there are a good handful of datapoints to the contrary. Personally, my myopia was never that bad, so I never got too deep into that stuff and just did the basic near-far-near exercises outside in the sun and that was enough to reverse the small decline in my vision.
My eye doctor had me come in first thing in the morning, then again the next day at the end of the day, after my workday, and my vision had degraded about -0.25 to -0.5 over the course of the day, which is apparently pretty typical. If your prescription is just a little bit off, your eye muscles will work a little harder to hold things in focus, but over the course of the day, they get strained and tired, and at the end of the day they can't do it anymore.
I can imagine if you really strength-trained those muscles, you could hold things in focus for longer, more comfortably, and inversely, I could imagine if you never really worked those muscles they'd atrophy somewhat.
But I'm not sure really straining those muscles all-day-every-day is healthy long term. It would be like sitting on a wooden stool all day during your workday and saying "all you need to do is keep your core muscles strong by doing x/y/z workout a couple times a day," versus just getting a decent ergonomic chair.
Nothing wrong with a workout or keeping your muscles strong, but in order to last a full lifetime, your muscles need lots of rest too, and I imagine getting proper glasses definitely helps.
FWIW my ophthalmologist made the point that most people working on computers have eyes go too dry toward the end of the day, and that also causes blurry vision. Try some eye drops.
> But I'm not sure really straining those muscles all-day-every-day is healthy long term.
Consider it "normal use of the muscle" and not straining and how normally using your muscles is considered good for you.
Personally, I expect a good chunk of the effect to be on the brain side, not in the physical muscle. Like how parents sometimes tell kids with a lazy eye to "use both your eyes". Keep the brain from giving up on it.
Mistletoe•2d ago
Edit:
"During the investor call, Lenz executives outlined the cost of VIZZ. A monthly, 25-pack will cost $79. A 3-month pack from the e-pharmacy will cost $198 ($66 per month). Samples are anticipated in the United States as early as October 2025, with commercial product to be broadly available by mid-Q4 2025."
tguvot•2d ago
krupan•2d ago
zimpenfish•2d ago
But the drops have the advantage of not messing with your distance vision like reading glasses do (unless you pay for varifocals, obvs.) - "[...] does not significantly affect the eye’s focusing muscles, so it doesn’t blur your distance vision [...]"
For someone who has to switch between near and distance often, I can see the drops being useful, especially if your distance vision is fine and you don't need varifocals.
roel_v•2d ago
Mistletoe•2d ago
How long should your new lenses last? Did they say? Will they eventually get hard like the human body’s lens or are you set for the rest of your life? It’s really cool you are part cyborg. Did you get a monofocal or multifocal lens?
yencabulator•2d ago
The flexible lens stuff is still relatively new and there are reports of them sort of being like 80% focused 100% of the time, which can suck. Apparently lots of individual variability in results, where as the single-focus lenses are 60s technology and well figured out.
roel_v•1d ago
Two things I do have: for optimal near vision, I have to keep things closer to my eyes than I did before, 20-ish cm. So I had to adjust my screen viewing and reading posture. Also, I have what are called 'halos' around lights in the dark (this is a known and expected side effect, tons of YT videos that explain why they happen). Driving in the dark on highways with lots of artificial light sources has gotten more straining - meaning I need to focus more and feel more tired after driving say 2 hours in those circumstances than I did before the surgery. All other driving is the same and I don't notice the halos any more in other cases, like say when I'm just walking through the city in the dark. The driving at night price to pay is well worth it for me, may be different for others.
Re: your mom - if she got monofocal lenses (which many people here do as they are the only ones covered by insurance if you're getting lens replacement for cataract), she would have gotten the choice between near- or far focus lenses, and would have decided together with the surgeon which ones are most appropriate for her life. I mean I obviously can't tell as I don't know her, but my dad is the same - he still needs reading glasses after his cataract surgery (IOL implants == cataract surgery).