You know how awesome your life is, right now?

Here’s just a tiny bit of a rant, from your darling friend Jakey Jake.  A rantey ode to the ridiculous amount of time your little buddy spent unraveling the mysteries of myopia progression.

Today you get to drop in here on the blog, and all those mysteries are explained, served on a silver platter.

Granted, finding this site is definitely quite a bit of luck on your part.  But from here you’ve got hundreds of posts here with how-to guides, students recounting steps in their progress, links to science studies, and even a structured program and direct support from me.  This right now is the most comprehensive myopia resource guide anywhere, online or otherwise.

And that, awesome as it is, is even just scratching the surface.

You don’t have to take my word for anything.  While the category labeling of posts that include medical studies could use work, you do get all the research starting points.  You know after just a little reading that all you need to do is look up things like “pseudopmyopia” and “ciliary spasm” and “lens-induced myopia”, and the dozen other clinical research study netting keywords we talk about here.

And then, you have scholar.google.com.  Odds are that you don’t even realize how monumental that search portal really is.

Back when I started my research, that didn’t exist.

I had to treck ten miles through the frozen snow, barefoot, uphill (both ways).  Dogs chasing me.

Even if not that, it was a lot of time going to actual libraries, finding actual medical literature, subscribing to actual journals.  Reading all that stuff.  Keeping notes and photocopying pages, and asking optometrists lots of questions.  There was a time when I even knew how to use the library card system.  What is a quick search away right now may have taken me months to stumble across, back then.

Of course you don’t need to reinvent the wheel, digging through research.

But you do want to at least take a cursory glance at some of it, to validate what I’m talking about here.  You want to do a little due diligence.  Just because I’m so handsome and I have literally dozens (well, one dozen) Twitter followers, doesn’t by itself merit trust.  As with anything, you want to find out what the foundation of the method is, and then see whether it’s scientifically sound.  And even if you decide that all the hippie guru talk here is offending your sensibilities, you can actually go out and know how and where to look for answers.

And that’s the amazingly cool part.  You *can* do this.  From your computer.  Sitting on your couch.  In about ten minutes you can uncover what would have taken months even ten years ago.  That still makes me feel a little envious, just thinking about.

Except maybe one detail.  A lot of those research studies, not free.

Not even cheap.  Since all that isn’t consumer Internet, there’s still value attached to the hundreds and sometimes thousands of hours that go into creating the data and related findings.

And they expect you to pay for that.

A lot of the studies you find on Google Scholar are pretty expensive to buy.

But as the title promises, and the header image gives away, the trick to free research studies:  If you have university library access, you can probably get a lot of those $30 to $50 studies you find on google scholar for free.  Very handy!

Most of the time you get the insights you really need from just the abstracts and summaries.  Occasionally you’ll find one where you might really want the whole thing.  You probably know at least one uni student who can help you out there.  And if not, a quick gig on Fiverr.com might get you library access for five bucks.

I still buy the ones I like, just to support the science.  If everybody paid, researchers wouldn’t have to rely on questionable corporate funding.

Either way though, go out there, and start taking care of your eyeballs.  I promise you that seeing the world is infinitely greater when you can do it without the crutches of having to stare through a lens.

Cheers,

-Jake