Bates Method time! Palming, gazing, eye rolling times, just ahead.
This site has hosted various fun posts on the subject of Bates Method in the past (like the Bates Method time machine and a slightly more level headed Bates Method explainer).
It’s worth bringing Bates up every so often, since on a daily basis thousands and thousands of people go online, Google vision improvement related keywords, and find Bates. Bates is the low hanging fruit for bro-science types (or rather, for superfood berry drink hawking life coaches). It’s the #1 most infested arena for illogical vision health advice, and I really wish all of it would just … stop.
Btw, if you’re a Bates Method coach, I’m extending you a special invitation for some free one on one sessions on an actual working method for natural myopia control. Trade in Bates for some proper tools, and make everyone happy.
You probably already know why Bates Method doesn’t work.
If you don’t, the two links at the beginning of this post are worth a quick read. In short, Bates was an early 20th century stab in the dark to deal with pseudo myopia specifically, and sometimes it even worked. It was pretty good for it’s time actually. If you are Amish for example, and insisting on riding around in horse-drawn buggies today, in 2016, and never worn glasses a day in your life, then Bates may be for you. It’s period appropriate, and it may work for your ciliary muscle spasm based, low myopia.
Bates Method core audience.
But if you have lens-induced progressive myopia (you can tell by touching your face, if you feel a pair of glasses there then this is you), then Bates won’t do much. You might get some small initial improvements, but that’s really it.
You need strain reduction and a stimulus based method to deal with lens-induced myopia. Bates is not that, unfortunately.
I just answered the Bates question again on Quora:
You are never going to get to 20/20 with Bates or eye exercises.Why would I say this? Because I tried. I tried Bates and pretty much everything else online, anything that could be bought in book format, and just about any product (pinhole glasses, and all the rest of it). None of it works.You might get a little improvement and get all excited, but that’ll be about the end of it. Just like the home treadmills that you find at $2 yard sales, all the Bates books are gathering dust in people’s corners.Why doesn’t it work? Well, it’s based on “science” from about 1902. Think about medical accomplishments and understanding from that time. What did Bates really know about eyes?For one, he didn’t know much about progressive, lens-induced myopia (which is caused largely by the hyperopic defocus created from the minus lenses you’re wearing every day). Can an exercise overcome the continuing effects of a focal plane change that you’re enforcing on a daily basis?No, of course it can not.Bates was workable for very low myopia (pseudo myopia as it’s known in medical science, or NITM – lens-induced transient myopia). It won’t do a da## thing for your high -6.5 diopter myopia.You can stop your myopia progression and possibly even reverse it. I’ve done it, and so have thousands of others. I’ll let you figure out how that works. ;)
Let’s recap your vision health resource options:
You’ve got licensed, professional ignorance on one side in form of retail optometry (selling you progressive myopia inducing glasses), and hippie superberry life coaches in form of Bates ebook coaching sellers, on the other. You’re either getting high myopia and a quick fix, or you’re getting confused and living in blur with a bunch of eye exercises.
That’s the somewhat depressing landscape of 2016 options for myopia control.
That and of course there’s one slightly eccentric ex-banker who refuses to take a serious tone on this serious matter, giving you the option to deal with frequent sarcasm in exchange for actual science-based vision health discussion.
I feel your pain. ;)
If you happen to have a progressive myope friend or family member torturing themselves with palming exercises (points though for site design), help them out. Send them a link to this post.
Cheers,
-Jake
