Temple Adjustments

Now let's talk about how to properly adjust the temple tips to get the proper fit for our patient. What I recommend is to first check to see how the frame is fitting to see if you need to make any adjustments at all.

The way we do this is by turning our patients face and putting your finger next to the ear on the temple tip itself where the bend needs to occur. If we keep our finger there and pull it off of our patients face, we’ll know where the bend is supposed to be. You'll see that in this frame that bend is actually supposed to be quite a bit back. When we have to do major adjustments like this, I always think it's a good idea to go ahead and straighten the temples out completely. The best way to do this is with something like the bionic thumb.

In this case, you will place the bionic thumb against the top of the temple and then bend the temple against the bionic thumb to straighten it out. You can go back and forth between the top and bottom of the temple until you're happy with how straight it looks. And then go ahead and do it to the other side as well. Once our temple tips are straight, then we have a better ground for work from. So, once we put it back on our patients face, what you’ll notice is, I'll put my fingers on either side where their ear actually starts, so I know where I want my bend to start. So, we simply put our frame back on our patient. We feel with our fingers here, where the bend should start, pull it back off our patients face and right here is where her ear starts, so that is where I want the bend to start.

So again, I take my bionic thumb, I place it on the bottom of the temple, close to where I had my finger marked. And we just bend against it. If you look it gives us a nice even curve without pinching it too much or creating a ninety-degree angle. So, it’s going to follow the natural curvature of the ear better. I always do one side at a time. So now well put it back on our patient to see if were happy with how it fits. Now this feels more correct so we’ll do the same thing to the other side. Again, well take our bionic thumb and we put it on the bottom of the temple. And just simply bend against it. And again, it gives us that nice smooth curve that we were looking for. Then we place it back on our patient and it should hook right into place around their ears. Now if we’ve done our job correctly, the easiest way to test to see if they are in the right spot and make sure that your patients frame wont slide down their nose, is to take either side of the frame and to gently pull against the ears to see if the frames will slide down the patients face or not. Make as many manipulations as possible until you’re happy and your patient is happy with how they feel and fit.