A quick thanks to those who e-mailed in response to yesterday’s post.

Yes, I was losing my mind just a little bit there.  It’s a real issue with committing to bring you daily posts here on the blog, I’m bound to have an off day or two.  Just know that I’m still doing a bit of finance consulting, then there’s the baby thing, and I get a bit overambitious with helping you with your myopia.  Too much, sometimes.

We’ll get through it!

A bit of perspective today, on why I rail on retail optometry so much.  It’ll be civil and short, promise.  ;-)

You already know all about how health for profit is a big problem in all of health care.  Optometrists are put into practice every day, expected to survive running a business.  These guys don’t exactly have the luxuries that you and I have here.  There’s no time to immerse oneself in reading medical journals if you’re an optometrist.  Sure, yours truly decided to travel the world for a half dozen years, talking to fascinating eyesight practitioners the world over.  I could at my own leisure take the very top of the most insightful ideas, and put them to the test on hundreds and hundreds of willing participants.  Nobody telling me what to believe, no bills to pay, taking a paraglider to Nepal and while there talking to backwater village Ayurveda healers.  It’s a bit ridiculous, sure, the luxury of time and research.

I didn’t have to earn a living.  Unfair and subject to derision and envy as it is, I did made a gazillion dollars in my 20’s.  You take a research nut, give him basically unlimited funds, a vexing eyesight deficiency, you’re bound to get results a bit out of the box.

Optometrists on the other hand have student loans and a looming retail space monthly lease payment and inventory to buy.  They have governing boards telling them what’s right and what’s wrong.  They have their education to contend with on top of all that, which in many parts of the world doesn’t exactly get far into talk about causes and prevention.

So in truth, I’m being a d*ckhead bully here.  Oh look, the rich kid turned self professed guru, telling the actual practitioners how it is.

Yes.  Not right, this.  Those of you who patiently put up with me, just realize that I do appreciate it.  You’re witness to the various growing pains of reconciling a terrible personality and a worthwhile message.   It’s going to take a while, and lots of e-mails from you, with gentle nudges in better directions.

Let me show you real quick though (yet again), why I get huffy at optometry.  We’ll use The Lancet in this example, a huge conglomerate of medical journal publishing.  Here’s what they published back in October of 2000:

In 1985, myopia researcher Brian Curtin noted that the subject of myopia and nearwork commonly elicited “impassioned responses, often visceral rather than cerebral”.1 This reaction was probably due in part to the many fanciful theories for the cause of myopia and the corresponding seemingly whimsical proposals for prevention of the disorder put forward in previous decades. Today there no longer seems to be any question that nearwork is a causal factor for myopia. The US National Academy of Sciences has stated that “doing near work places one at risk for myopia”.

15 years ago.  Sure is making the news and changing the world, isn’t it.

With the sarcasm again.  Apologies.  Of course important to note, that’s not fringe conspiracy theorist talk.  That’s as staunch mainstream as you get, when the Academy of Sciences makes a statement like this.  15 years ago.

And yet, to this day I get ridiculed, threatened, screamed at, called an idiot a thousand times over in various e-mails from those in the field.  Not for the far out things we get into here, even.  Just the mere suggestion that myopia is no “genetic illness”, sends licensed professionals into a complete frenzy.

I quote them out of their own medical journals, and they completely loose their minds.

That’s why I am so seemingly unfoundedly hostile towards the establishment.  They do attempt to bully me on a very regular basis, and if I didn’t have a whole lot of free time (and the means to reign things in as necessarily), they’d have shut me up by now.

That’s why I’m occasionally a teeny bit sh*tty toward them.  And yes you’re right, I still shouldn’t be.

While we’re on this subject, are you familiar with the whole premise of antifragility?

Antifragility is a concept developed by Professor Nassim Nicholas Taleb, and a term he coined in his book, Antifragile. Antifragility refers to systems that increase in capability, resilience, or robustness as a result of stressors, shocks, volatility, mistakes, faults, attacks, or failures.

[1] As Taleb explains in his book, antifragility is fundamentally different from the concepts of resiliency (i.e. the ability to recover from failure) and robustness (that is, the ability to resist failure).

Source:  Wikipedia

There’d be no eye guru if it wasn’t for those various attacks and challenges.  Years ago I was content helping out of friends, as a side project.  But whenever I’d have a run in with the establishment, I’d become more resolved to stand my ground.  Every time they picked on me, I got one step closer to going all out and declaring #endmyopia to be a thing.

So here it is.  With your help the message will get more on point, less combative, better honed.  The lens sales thing is nonsense and licensed medical doctors are still permitted to say things like, “Oh well your eyes, Jonny boy, lost cause.  Genetic defect.  Buy these glasses. ”  We on the other hand, aren’t allowed to choose our own prescriptions, and I have to joke about my guru beard because heaven forbid, someone not indoctrinated by the establishment to have anything to say about vision health.

#Endmyopia, kittehs.   Keep at it, with the e-mails and comments, and do follow me on Twitter, even if you don’t actually Twitter (because nobody does, unless they’re trying to sell ebooks or Internet marketing).

Cheers,

-Jake