Why Do I Need Glasses?

You are wearing glasses (or contact lenses). If you take them off, everything is blurry – especially at a distance. This is commonly referred to as “myopia” (or nearsightedness, or shortsightedness).

Some retail lens vendors (optometrists) will tell you that your myopia is some “mysterious genetic defect”. And that you will need glasses for life. And that causes of nearsightedness (myopia) are not well understood.

Retail optometry is a 100 billion dollar a year glasses-selling industry. And their claims about some “mysterious genetic defect” are entirely untrue – though very convenient.

In reality your myopia started out as something called pseudomyopia (or NITM, near induced transient myopia). Your early myopia was a strain symptom, plain and simple. Too much time staring at books (or screens) caused your eye’s focusing muscle to spasm. This is well understood in clinical science and has been cited in peer reviewed studies tens of thousands of times for well over five decades.

Once you began wearing the quick fix (glasses) for pseudomyopia, your eyes became affected by something referred to in clinical science as ‘lens-induced myopia’. That’s why your eyes seemed to be getting ‘worse’ – specifically due the glasses you are wearing.

It is important and worthwhile to take the time to understand the basic biology (and truth) about the cause of myopia. Understanding the cause of myopia will help lead you to meaningful answers about possible solutions.

We here at endmyopia don’t subscribe to the narrative of myopia as a “genetic condition” or “illness” or indeed any type of “medical issue”. We look at myopia simply as a refractive state, a perfectly healthy eye adapting to strain, and stimulus.

So there is definitely no kind of medical advice here, and the only vision subject we discuss is that of myopia.

Measuring Your Eyesight

Have you ever looked at your glasses “prescription”?

By the way, we consider the term “prescription” to be misleading. It seems more of a selling tool rather than some kind of medical treatment (your eyes being neither sick nor broken). In fact, the lens sellers are marking up $2 pieces of clear curved pieces of plastic by many hundreds, if not thousands of percent over their wholesale cost.

So, this “prescription”” The numbers on that piece of paper, are called ‘diopters’. And here’s the fun part: Diopters are just a fancy way to refer to how far you can see, before things get blurry. Which is something you can easily do at home, no fancy equipment or diploma required.

All you need is a measuring tape, some text to help find the blur distance, and a simple formula:

Diopters = 100 / centimeters (to where blur starts)

So for example if you can see 50cm before blur starts, that’s 100 / 50 which equals 2. Your glasses would need to be 2 diopters to give you 20/20 eyesight.

Then why all the charades and fancy equipment, you wonder?

Well, it’s a whole lot easier to make you not feel empowered, so you’ll be far less likely to ask why a $2 plastic lens is going to cost you $100 (or $200, $300, and more). Of course there may be more benign explanations. We’d likely be less cynical if they weren’t marking up those lenses by a few thousand percent.