What is "near-sightedness"?

What is "near-sightedness"?

Robert K. Maloney (Ophthalmologist) gives expert video advice on: Where do I go for eye care?; How do I find an eye doctor in my area?; Where do tears come from? and more...

Near-sightedness means you can see things up close without your glasses, but you can't see things that are far away. Generally if you're near-sighted it means that the curvature of the front part of your eye, what we call the cornea, that's that part right there, is too curved for the size of your eye. So to correct that, you either make your eye smaller, there's no way to do that, you reshape the cornea, that's what we call LASIK or laser surgery, or you wear glasses or contacts. There's about 60,000,000. Americans who are near-sighted, based on studies that are now probably 10 to 15 years old. My suspicion is there's considerably more than that, because there's a higher incidence of near-sightedness in young people today than ever before.