It is commonly known that most of our patients who have astigmatism have cylinder of less than 0.75D. In fact, the majority of those who have astigmatism have less than 1.25D of cylinder (Young et al, 2011).
So we pose this question: Is it normal to put a patient who has low cylinder, such as a prescription of –4.50 –0.75 x180, in toric lenses? Our guess is that the vast majority of us would initially vertex this patient and prescribe a lens with a spherical equivalent. You could even argue that this would be the best course of action because, indeed, placing a lens with –0.75D of cylinder on this patient would leave him slightly overminused in the cylinder meridian. We could even take this one argument further: why place a toric lens on this patient at all? Toric lenses cost more, take more time to fit, and the patient will not notice the difference.
READ more: https://www.clspectrum.com/issues/2015/february-2015/is-this-the-new-norm
