Play a thought exercise with me.

Imagine you go to medical school.  You are taught many brilliant things.  You decide to specialize on eyesight.  Your friends make great money in myopia related fields.  Optometry, ophthalmology.  You figure, why not.  You’ve got six figures in student loans to pay off.  You sign up.

Fast forward a couple of decades.

You’ve prescribed glasses and contact lenses to thousands of people.  You long noticed a trend.  Every single client came in first needed only a -1.00 to -1.50 prescription.  Every one.  Nobody ever came in needing a -3.00 for starters.

And most of who you prescribed that first -1.25, came back at some point later.  A year or two usually.  Most of those needed a slight increase.  A quarter diopter.  A half diopter.  Some astigmatism correction.  Maybe a bit more on left eye or right, or vice versa.

Of the ones that keep coming back for the annual checkups, it’s pretty much a given that they need a bit of an increase most years.  The ones who work in front of computers in particular.  

There is the occasional client, who refuses to wear glasses.  More often than not its kids and their parents.  The parents push for glasses, the kid refuses to wear them.  They come back every year, and every year the kid stays at the -1.25 or so he started with.

That’s the thought exercise.

At what point do you start to notice a trend?  At what point do you say, well gee, this is curious. Nobody ever starts off with a -3.00 prescription.  But once I give them that -1.25, and they wear it, they’ll eventually be up to -3.00.  And the few who refuse my treatment don’t get better, but they also never get worse.  A -1.25 who refuses to wear his glasses, stays at -1.25.

At what point do you start to wonder if your treatment is perhaps totally responsible for all that increasing myopia?  Think about it.  You’ve got a medical education.  You studied statistics, you read countless medical studies, your brain is primed to look for cause and effect.

So then you see thousand upon thousands of people, prescribe the same exact treatment, which …

I wonder about these things.  Do you?  Maybe it’s time to start thinking about #endmyopia.  ;-)

Cheers!

– Jake