Logging tool. The latest in a decade long journey of coming to understand the grand mystery that is myopia. Let’s start this post with a quick recap of my own myopia story, up to right now, today:
Jake Gets Myopia
First myopia diagnosis, early teens. Shocked, hate the idea of glasses. Get the first pair though, and the sudden super sharpness is addictive.
Glasses increase throughout teens and more slowly in the 20’s. Secretly enjoying the optometrist visits, the new glasses are always like some kind of drug fix. Up the dose, that blast of extra clarity. Increasing numbers though, disconcerting.
Never totally comfortable, since vision always depends on glasses. Anybody knocks those, and you can’t see. Probably didn’t help make me any better at sports or socially confident.
Try contact lenses, eyes too dry. Really disappointed.
Jake Gets Sick Of Myopia
Glasses are just part of life. Years pass by. Eventually there’s the moment where the myopia progression becomes unacceptable. Over -4 already, being told I need -5. I go on a long and extensive journey to figure out whether my eyes are really broken.
Slowly figure out the bits and pieces that make up myopia, how it happened, and finding ways to reverse it. Buying all books, visiting optometrists all over the world, slowly recovering eyesight.
Myopia Turns Into A Science Project
A few friends get roped in as guinea pigs, I’m curious to what extent my experience can be reproduced. This turns into a bit of a serious project, recruiting more people to test, compare, analyze.
I find myself shocked at how predictably myopia can be both induced (yes, we did purposely create myopia as well), and reduced.
The Mainstream Doesn’t Want To Know
Contact optometrists, industry publications, asking questions. Now also shocked at the degree of denial, apathy, ignorance, and even aggressive behavior. Finding that the range of response goes from not caring, to attempts at intimidation. Something very wrong here, with this profession.
The friends guinea pig experiment turns into word of mouth referrals. Random people ask for advice.
Jake The Eye Guru
Eventually advice asking gets out of hand, I start charging heavily to limit the inquiry volume. Making friends in the industry, looking for others to refer people to. Not looking to make a business out of what’s clearly dangerous heretic, non-medical, non-licensed health advice.
Limited success, licensed professionals risk losing their license sharing non 16th century , lens-sales based advice.
Science Project Becomes A Tool For Myopes
Contributing to online resources about natural myopia control. Behind the scenes help creating and improving ways to help others improve their eyesight. Happy to stay out of the way, and yet keep collecting experience, sharing ideas, improving tools.
Wind up chaperoning @endmyopia. By now the whole thing has turned into a serious side hobby (passion project?). Regular inquiries asking for evidence, science, interviews.
Success Creates Questions
I just wanted to fix my eyes. And then I wanted to know why it worked. And then I didn’t mind sharing my experiences. And then it seemed reasonable to turn that into a repeatable, quantifiable strategy for others. And since the earlier brush with the mainstream, not interested in wasting time arguing about theory or being trolled.
The numbers are real however, and students would benefit from a common logging tool, and with all this data being created, it’s a shame not aggregating it. Realizing that this is the next logical step, now creating tools to allow easier quantifying of success rates and progress of myopia reduction.
The basis for some real, unbiased, natural myopia control science is ready to be hatched. Exciting times! And that’s where we are today.
Logging Tool, V1
A few false starts, various piles of time and money allocated towards learning experiences only. Making software is generally a losing proposition, especially when you’re not going to be selling it.
But, data!
Time to try it out.
It’s now available in the member section.
If you are member, feel free to put in some of your log data, and let’s see all the various ways it’ll break, and what we’ll want to do to make it work nicely. It’ll help you keep track of progress, give me a basis to offer advice, and later on it’ll maybe even be able to offer automated suggestions, goals, and estimates of expected progress.
Look for the link in the forum (pinned post), let’s get to looking at some data! Super, super excited! :)
Housekeeping: If you’re just a casual reader, you don’t get to play. Yet. For now. I’m planning on sharing some of the resulting data later on, and we’ll be able to use aggregates to look at general improvement rates and various insights. I’ll also open some more BackTo20/20 spots for the occasion, drop me an e-mail if you want an invite.
There’s no plan at this moment to release the tool to the general public, since it’s tied to the premise of using a structured approach. Everybody uses the same approach, and with that we can look at resulting data – we know input and output, for some meaningful numbers. And the structured approach still requires a bit of support (it’s not bulletproof for everyone, so I do have to spend time to answer questions and help tweak things). Support means my time, and Jake ain’t working for free.
At some point in the future hopefully we’ll have friendly optometrists offering this format of natural myopia control for you locally. That’s my end goal, putting this all in the hands of local resources you can go visit and get help from directly.
Cheers,
-Jake
