You may have heard the story of when I poisoned myself recently.
It was ugly, for a moment. Staring into the hotel bathroom mirror, towel stuffed in my mouth to stem the bleeding, watching dark pools of blood swirl past my teeth, and I’m unable to stop any of it. I’m going to bleed out, right here in this stupid room. The days leading up to this had been a downward spiral, and this, where I’ll be toast. Jake, who survived years of ridiculous adrenaline adventures, jumping from mountain peaks, riding excessively, mad fast motorbikes, living in dodgy places from Cambodia to Kathmandu, dies in a crappy Saigon hotel room.
Obviously, I didn’t die.
But I did go to the biggest and most well equipped hospital in Saigon. They referred me to a specialist. She sees swollen, bleeding gums, stained teeth (from all the blood), and decides that I have periodontitis (which isn’t at all the case, entirely different thing, with just the symptom in common). Her diagnosis is completely wrong and her treatment plan is in no way helpful for a case of acute poisoning.
I insist on liver function tests, I cobble together my own answers using some of the diagnostic resources of the hospital. I call doctors I trust, halfway across the world, for ideas.
I could have seriously died, trusting that one medical professional, the licensed, trusted doctor.
Above, not necessarily a suggestion for you to abandon the mainstream.
It’s a wilderness out there. The alternative health quackery, often even worse than the mainstream. There isn’t one camp or another, to trust blindly.
What’s my point?
Not everything I say is certain truth. I’m wrong as at least as often as the next guy.
The recent bashing from the behavioral optometrist got me thinking, though. Jake Steiner, the unknown quantity. Nobody controls Jake, I’m not allied with any big gang (or, licensed profession). I don’t have a lens sales quota, I don’t have to appease some manufacturer to keep my research grant. There’s no licensing board telling me what I can or can’t say (or think). I didn’t start out with traditional optometry school, and the indoctrination into that dogmatic way of thinking. I take no-one’s word for anything, and I don’t have bills to pay. That’s a dangerous combination.
On the flip side, Hollywood A-listers and Olympic athletes and medical professionals in a wide range of disciplines and tens of thousands of people of all walks of life, like and follow my work on natural myopia control. I run a site with over 600.000 readers, as well as having launched the largest ever natural myopia control study ever attempted, including mechanistic data collection and mainstream optometrist involvement.
Think about it. Where does almost all revolutionary new insight and progress come from? From the mainstream insiders? Was Steve Jobs a seasoned IBM PC manager, a well-behaved suit-wearing VP at Nokia? Did Elon Musk come from Detroit motor thinking? How many human cadavers were cut open, in secret and away from the establishment, looking for knowledge about the human body?
No mainstream optometrist is ever going to ‘find’ the answers to myopia. You’ll have to look to the rebels, misfits, the crazy ones, like Steve called hem. The agents of change.
It’s not me, I’m talking about here. I’m just the instigator. You are the one to make it happen, by trying these methods on your own eyes. Your insights, your results, all come together to send a message, to build a case. Myopia is no illness. The eye responds to stimulus. By myself I’m just a crazy guy, talking about far fetched idea. But with you, becoming part of the change, we end up being a powerful voice. We are the misfits, the rebels. We beat myopia and prove that they had it wrong, all along.
Cheers,
-Jake
