I am not sure about Canadas situation since that is where I used to order my contacts from before I got LASIK several years ago. I don’t recall having to provide a script then. But Mexico and several other European countries I’ve been to (Sweden as an example) it’s absolutely the case you can just walk into the pharmacy and grab the magnification you need with no prescription. I am actually surprised you were able to provide that many counter examples but I’ve never tried to buy contacts in the countries you’ve listed outside of Canada
> it’s absolutely the case you can just walk into the pharmacy and grab the magnification you need with no prescription.
I don’t understand how this could possibly work. Contact lenses have at least three parameters to define the lens. It’s not just “magnification”.
If you have an astigmatism, there are two more, and a further two if you have presbyopia (for a total of up to 7). Almost everyone has presbyopia by the age of 65, so it’s not some rare condition.
Do these pharmacies you speak of just have aisles upon aisles of contact lenses?
When I was in Germany, I saw vending machines where you could buy contacts. Sure, there's a lot of possible values, but they probably only stock the most popular ones.
Here in Japan, you can easily buy contacts from optical stores. They have several shelves behind the counters where they stock many varieties. Sometimes they even put a bunch of unsold/unpopular ones out front for 1/2 off (a lot of these are color contacts). I get mine online; I don't need a prescription.
One thing I did notice, as someone with astigmatism, is that the number of possible values is less here. My axis back in the US was 100, but here I have to use 90; they just don't carry them in all the possible axis values here.
Not aisles upon aisles but yeah for instance in Apotek, a big pharmacy chain in Sweden, there is usually a whole wall of them with little drawers to pick from. As sibling comment mentioned there isn’t every combination available so presumably you have to special order some if you have some weird combination but for myself who never had astigmatism at all it was perfectly fine.
