We occasionally make fun of optometry here. Clueless lens sellers, etc etc. It’s easy and amusing. But really, do you think that all of them are really all that clueless about what’s actually going on? Hardly likely if you really think about it. Not everybody can conceivable be that dumb or blind-eyed. Stuff naturally goes way deeper than ‘everybody is ignorant’.
I wasn’t even going to post this story online.
We’ve talked about specific optometrists here in the blog before. Optometrists who have talked. Optometrists who have said, yes genetic myopia is a load of b*llshit. Optometrists who offered alternatives. Optometrists who said, all that minus is a horrible solution.
Didn’t work out too well for most of them.
And yes you can search the blog, all this is still there. I won’t link it again here, no point fanning those flames. Search if you like.
But then it depends on the country really, the whole shutting up of truth. Some places are not run by a well focused optometry mafia, and you’ll know it by how many optometrists talk about not wearing glasses too much, or increasing diopters unnecessarily. I’ve found Italy for example to be pretty progressive on that front. And Russia, interestingly enough. India even in some places. If you go to a dozen optometrists in various countries, you start getting a feel for the general attitude about myopia control.
Places mostly where profit seeking isn’t at maximum greed levels, you can possibly get real answers.
But Jake, you’re thinking. Get to the point.
All right. Point, this e-mail:
Silence … is golden?
There you have it. An anecdote in an e-mail, screenshot on the Internet. Height of credible evidence.
But still. Optometrist helps his kids reduce their myopia, but refuses to talk about it? What’s up with that?
And before you get to thinking that Jakey is getting on the conspiracy theory bandwagon. I’m really not. If you think just rationally about how the whole thing fits together, it makes good enough sense. Optometry is a fancy word for selling lenses. If you go to optometry school, how do you pay off your student loans? Yes, by going to work for a place that sells lenses. There aren’t a lot of other job offers for somebody with an optometry degree. It’s a lens selling industry. Nothing more, nothing less.
So if you find yourself in this business and you have a brain and you know about vision biology and one day you think, damn yo, this all makes no sense. Every one of my ‘patients’ just gets more myopia with my minus lens treatment. Minus lenses, maybe part of the problem here.
And then you go figure it out. It’s not that far fetched really. There’s plenty of it written in optometry clinical science journals. No huge leap required.
But can you talk about it?
Can you answer some random person on Facebook who goes, hey yo, I hear you fix myopia? Are you going to bite the lens selling hand that feeds you? Of course not. You’re going to think, oh shiiiiiz, this could take about three minutes to totally spiral out of control, viral Facebook post, all the local optometrists calling me crazy, me never getting another job ever again. I’ve got kids to feed.
So you do the sane thing. You go, nope. Nope nope nope.
Just like that.
You go, ask another optometrist. Nothing to see here.
Crisis averted.
You don’t ever want to be the one guy going against agreed upon dogma. You don’t be the one guy who disagrees with all your peers. Even if you’re right. We live in massive societies, ruled by large group dynamics and these large groups only work well with consensus. Group survival requires consensus. So you keep your mouth shut, wisely.
And because that’s how it is, darling kittehs looking for myopia answers find themselves on these endmyopia fringes blog. With a darling eye guru and his imaginary beard.
And with all that said, cheers to you.
-Jake
