Getting your eyes dilated can be inconvenient – including making the eyes light sensitive and having difficulty reading for a couple of hours.

So wouldn’t it be great to have another drop to reverse the effects of dilation?

On Dec. 31, 1990, Dapiprazole, under the trade name Rev-Eyes, was approved by the FDA and thought to be the answer to all the post-dilation problems. It was marketed for treatment of medically induced dilation by stimulating pupillary constriction and restoration of accommodative function for reading.

In clinical practice, Dapiprazole took between one to two hours to return pupils to pre-dilation size.

Side effects such as stinging upon instillation, conjunctival hyperemia (redness of eye), headache, and a few instances of ptosis (lid drooping), with a possible additional dollar cost to patients, appear to lessen Dapiprazole’s overall clinical benefit.

Reading ability returned in approximately 43 minutes with dapiprazole vs 66 minutes without...

Will reading glasses make your eyes worse? The short answer is ‘No.’

Although we don’t know the exact mechanism by which humans have a decreased ability to focus up close as we age (a process called presbyopia), the fact remains that it will happen to all of us.

The leading theory of how this occurs is that the lenses in our eyes get stiffer and thicker as we age such that one of the muscles in the eye that contracts to change the shape of the lens does so less and less effectively because the lens itself gets less pliable.

The process of changing the focus of the lens from far away objects to up-close objects is called accommodation. If you have normal distance vision without glasses, then your eyes’ natural focus spot is far off in the distance. In order to focus on an object close to you, the lens in your eye has to alter its shape. The ability of your lens to do that is at its best when you are born and it slowly gets less and less pliable as the years go on. You have...