"The constant pressure from the nosepads and arms of glasses on your face, has potentially deleterious long-term consequences to the lymphatic channels of the face, resulting in increased incidence of sinus pressure headaches, fibromyalgia, middle-ear infections leading to tinnitus, and potentially even blockages of glymphatic drainage leading to increased likelihood of brain aneurism in old age."
...is the sort of thing the FDA would say, if you had just invented glasses today; before then demanding a 20-year longitudinal cohort study to disprove those possible risks. (They might also list all those same risk factors for wearing a hat.)
My point being — we can come up with all sorts of plausible potential risks of literally any technology, new or old. There are plenty of subtle long-term consequences of our interactions with everyday objects that nobody has ever stopped to consider; anything can potentially be doing esoteric bad things to us.
But if we invented prescription glasses today, and everyone until now had been just walking around nearsighted — bumping into things, unable to legally drive, etc — for lack of them; then should we hold off on allowing them to be sold, until we do such a study? Or should we accept that being able to see outweighs a bunch of entirely-hypothetical risks?
Or, on a related note, how about this: would it have been "responsible" to prevent people from getting laser eye surgery, out of concern that it might make their night vision worse?
I'm not really sure what you're getting at. You can get glasses now and not put PFAS in your eye and have improved vision. Some people don't like wearing glasses and would prefer contacts. Maybe they can make an informed decision between long term discomfort and the very low increased possibility of a future eye disease? People aren't good at long term thinking though.
re laser eye surgery, there was a story pretty recently about the number of post surgery issues being downplayed and under-represented. If you had a full and true picture of the risks then you might avoid laser eye surgery, but people running laser eye surgery clinics don't want you to have all the information.
...is the sort of thing the FDA would say, if you had just invented glasses today; before then demanding a 20-year longitudinal cohort study to disprove those possible risks. (They might also list all those same risk factors for wearing a hat.)
My point being — we can come up with all sorts of plausible potential risks of literally any technology, new or old. There are plenty of subtle long-term consequences of our interactions with everyday objects that nobody has ever stopped to consider; anything can potentially be doing esoteric bad things to us.
But if we invented prescription glasses today, and everyone until now had been just walking around nearsighted — bumping into things, unable to legally drive, etc — for lack of them; then should we hold off on allowing them to be sold, until we do such a study? Or should we accept that being able to see outweighs a bunch of entirely-hypothetical risks?
Or, on a related note, how about this: would it have been "responsible" to prevent people from getting laser eye surgery, out of concern that it might make their night vision worse?