From The Forum: Fun With Concepts

I have to admit:  I have relatively little patience for a variety of subjects in my field.

Conceptual discussions, dissecting obscure studies with little real world application, and arguing with peers unwilling to consider rehabilitation – people who know me well enough, are well aware of how easy it can be to push my buttons with any of those topic areas.

Mostly it is because so much time is taken up with doing the things that actually help people.  I run out of energy way before I get through the tangibly important client questions.  I often feel guilty knowing that my e-mail box has a backlog of several days, making me more touchy about topics that are just philosophical.

I am probably like your average overworked auto mechanic.  When I am done in the shop, I don’t want to even think about car engines.  

Of course I realize that for anyone just discovering this subject, the discussions I don’t have the ambition for, are in fact very interesting.  I realize the merit.  I am open to having a forum for these interactions, and I do even enjoy reading them.  

But then if you ever see me responding, and I’m not as apparently patient, please forgive me.  It’s just an occupational hazard that makes me appear cranky on occasion.

One of these kinds of threads just arrived in the forum again, recently.

They come up every so often, and usually you can tell just by the fact that it’s the only one I have not yet responded to.  I do smile though when I read some of the well conceived responses, and I marvel at the diversity of readers and participants of this project.

L asks:

Lets say I started the rehab with -8 diopters, and I managed to read at the edge of focus without glasses at 8cm. One year later I reduced a diopter and Im able to read at 10cm. These are fiction numbers, but for what I see in high myopes thats not far from the reality.

We know that a vision towards infinity is beyond 6 meters. That means if you are at 10cm, you need 590cm of improvement to get to 6 meters, at this pace of 2cm a year would take 295 years to get to emmetropia.

295 years, indeed more patience required than we might have.

I digress.  If you do imagine me shaking my head, grumbling at the screen and moving on to the next topic, you do already know me well.  But that’s not to say that it isn’t an interesting question.

Ruth Ann adds some ideas:

-5 diopters would be edge of blur at 20 cm; (100 divided by 5 is 20);
-4 would be 25 cm,
-3 would be 33 cm,
-2 would be 50 cm.

Emmetropia would be no blur at all, or zero diopters. You can’t divide by zero.
So perfect vision is no blur at 100 cm and beyond to infinity.

If you are at -5.5 diopters, and improve one diopter a year, it would take you five and a half years to get to emmetropia. The first year you would improve to 22 cm, the second year to 28 cm, the third year to 40 cm, the fourth year to 66 cm (-1.5 diopters). . . If you improve by one diopter a year, you would be improving by more cemtimeters per year the closer you get to emmetropia.

But we can’t assume a constant rate of improvement for myopia. The first diopters are easier to reverse than the last one, I understand.

Ruth Ann is also a great source of motivation, with her first hand experience of the program, and very strong results. Read some of her accounts.

And then there is Tom, who makes me wish that the forum had some kind of “hero points” designation, adds this priceless post:

That reasoning reminds me of the so-called Zeno’s dichotomy paradox (incidentally a favorite among philosophers too!): 

——–
A runner wants to run a certain distance – let us say 100 meters – in a finite time. But to reach the 100-meter mark, the runner must first reach the 50-meter mark, and to reach that, the runner must first run 25 meters. But to do that, he or she must first run 12.5 meters.
Since space is infinitely divisible, we can repeat these ‘requirements’ forever. Thus the runner has to reach an infinite number of ‘midpoints’ in a finite time. This is impossible, so the runner can never reach his goal. In general, anyone who wants to move from one point to another must meet these requirements, and so motion is impossible, and what we perceive as motion is merely an illusion.
Where does the argument break down? Why?
——

Lecture time! This “paradox” really originates from an incorrect assumption. Namely, that it’s impossible to make infinitely many “midpoints” in finite amount of time. In fact, each intermediate distance does get shorter and shorter, hence each of those distances requires progressively less amount of time.

Suppose that you reach the first “midpoint” in 1 unit of time (i.e., the first 50 meters), then reaching the second “midpoint” would require an additional ½ unit of time, and ¼ unit of time and so on.

This means that in total, you would only need 1+½+¼+⅛+….= 2 units of time to reach the 100m mark. “Paradox” solved!