Can contacts lenses cure near-sightedness?
There's a practice called orthokeratology, in which hard contact lenses or gas permeable contacts are used to reshape the eye. It's almost like squeezing a size eight foot into a size six shoe. If you do that for long enough your foot will become squeezed into a smaller shape, your toes will turn inwards. We use the same principle on your eye, by intentionally misfitting a contact lens to your eye, the doctor can cause the eye to temporarily change shape. Then, when you take the lens out, your vision is good, you can see far away again, your near-sightedness is temporarily corrected. It's a way of correcting near-sightedness for people who don't want to have laser surgery. Now unfortunately it's got some disadvantages, the main one is that it's temporary. So, every day you have to wear the contacted lens that's called a retainer lens, to hold your eye into the new shape. If you skip it for a day or two your eye goes back to the way it was. The other disadvantage is that it tends to be a little less comfortable, because these lenses are intentionally misfit. It's like wearing a shoe that's not quite the right size. There's also a limitation in that they can only correct small degrees of near-sightedness. So, if you're nearsightedness is in the moderate or high degrees, they can reduce your near-sightedness, but you still have to wear glasses.
