Contact lens maintenance is an important part of wearing contact lenses that often goes overlooked. When you consider that contact lenses are actually foreign objects that you are sticking in your eye you’d think that most people would want to make sure they are cleaned and disinfected but a lot of times people cut corners when it comes to this important part of lens care.
If you’re the kind of person that can be bothered to maintain your contact lenses properly then you might consider disposable contact lenses which require no maintenance. But if you can’t wear disposables and you are using daily lenses that need to be cleaned you want to be sure to follow your eye doctor’s instructions for proper lens care.
Typically contact lens maintenance involves using multipurpose solutions that clean and disinfect your lenses. These solutions are the same ones you will use for storing the lenses that can be usually bought in any pharmacy. When you remove your lenses, you should always wash your hands with soap and water to avoid getting bacteria in your eye. Once the lens is removed you want to squirt it on both sides with a steady stream of the solution for 20 seconds – or the amount of time specified on the bottle. Some solutions might specify that you need to rub the lens with your finger in the palm of your hand and if that is the case you want to do this carefully so you don’t rip the lens. This step can be important as it may be necessary to remove any protein or microscopic dirt that has built up. After rubbing, you’ll want to rinse again to wash off the debris that you’ve rubbed off.
Now if you’re storing your contact lenses, you want to fill the little storage cases with the solution. Then you want to be sure to put the lens into the appropriate side because some people have a different prescription for each eye and you want to make sure that you’re putting the right lens in the right eye when you take them out the next day. While your lenses are soaking in the storage unit the solution will be disinfecting them.
Usually you’ll be following the same maintenance steps whether you wear gas permeable or soft contact lenses. Because people very often skip these steps you want to make sure that you make the cleaning as easy and mechanical as possible. Simply make it part of your daily routine just like brushing your teeth.
Remember that proper contact lens maintenance means that everything that touches your lenses has to be clean. This means that you need to wash your fingers before you handle your lenses and make sure that the tips of your solution bottles are clean. Also, you’ll need to clean out your storage containers after every time you remove the lenses.
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