Question: What is myopia (nearsightedness) and how common is it?
Answer: Myopia, otherwise known as nearsightedness, is an extremely common what we call an eye error or refractive error of the eye. Nearsightedness refers to the fact, in a simple way of putting it, that a patient can see well up close, thus near, but not well for distance. And it just means things that outside a certain near range tend to be blurry.
It really is referring to the fact that the eye is really too powerful, whether it's too long or too strong of a what we call bending light or refracting, and that means that the image that gets to what is called the retina, the film of the eye, is blurred by the time it gets there.