Resist the temptation to try some random ‘natural’ cure for eye issues.  Please.

The odds that you’ll experience anything in the range from just wasting your time to seriously messing up your eyes, are very high.  Much higher than you actually finding some “cure”, some “easy natural remedy”.  In fact whenever you see any of what I show you in this article, just click away, and forget all about it.

Besides what modern optometry propagates of course, most everything else (that’s not specifically dry and unreadable stuff you find on Google Scholar) is probably complete nonsense.  Needle in the haystack, finding actual meaningful truth with some scientific basis, when it comes to eyesight.

Here’s a few, just from my own e-mail and even our Facebook group isn’t immune.  Let’s look at some examples, and connect them to the theme of bullsh*t they’re part of..

#1:

Modern Life Is Killing Your Eyes

Let’s blame modern life on everything.

Nevermind that we live longer and healthier than ever before in human history, to the point where our overall health is leading to massive overpopulation of the planet.

Sure, it sells vegan organic cookies for twelve dollars, but most of the “modern life is killing you” is a bunch of sales-minded scare tactics.  

Also much beloved by the clickbait-parrot contingent:

Yes, let’s blame modern life for everything.

Look at Arielle’s reasonable question.  Reasonable, right?

And then look at the answers.  There are the types of people who share their own experience.  And the kind of offer thoughts, though clearly framing them as guesses.  Perfectly acceptable.  

But then things go straight to nonsense.

Don’t get me wrong here, we are all susceptible to this, and if nobody points out the bullsh*t theme to help you catch it, you might fall for it on occasion.  And I’m not picking on Kohl, he’s just the victim of this example.  Kohl is spouting the sort of nonsense that Facebook likers love, stuff that means nothing but conveniently blames something other than us, something we can’t change.  “Modern life did it.”

What does that even mean, “assimilate light properly”?  

Of course.  Yes.  Some tiny bit of truth in the statement, if you give it lots and lots of latitude, and remove the context of the question altogether.  Spending 12 hours in front of screens, in fluorescent lightning, not ideal for healthy eyesight.

But unrelated to why Arielle perceives a darker image without glasses.

I offer the very abbreviated version of the reason she is actually having that experience (see last comment in screenshot above), just to not leave Kohl’s statement, poised as fact, as the last thing in the thread.   It’s one of those things that isn’t obvious unless you know a fair amount about the subject – nobody would blame you speculating.  The point here is that you can easily discount explanations following the theme of Kohl’s argument.

What’s the take-away here?  Very simply, eyesight health advice offered after the vague and general overture of “modern life …”, should be at least highly suspect.

Next up, alternative home remedies.

Putting Random Crap Into Your Eyes

Yea, that’s gross.  And dumb.

Spit in your eye to cure any eye problem.  Sounds totally reasonable.

You’d be surprised how many questions I get about putting stuff in your eyes, to cure this and that malaise.  What a horrible idea that is, ranging anywhere from harmlessly useless to full-on wreck your eyes.  I’ve got a form reply for the e-mail admin for specifically “putting stuff in eye question”, that’s strongly worded suggesting *not* to mess with the tear fluid layer.

Want to know exactly how complex the tear fluid is and what all it does?  Prepare to have your brain hurt:  “Human Tear Fluid Lipidome: From Composition to Function“

Skim over that, do me the favor.  At least click and glance at it.  

Now after you skim that, tell me how spitting in your eye is possibly going to improve the incredibly complex functioning of the tear fluid layer you just disrupted, with all the bacteria and germs festering your mouth.  Even a casual explanation of how mouth-saliva helps there, with just some basic science, I’ll take it.

There isn’t any reason to do that, of course.  Don’t put crap in your eyes.  That doesn’t necessarily exclude medically sanctioned things like contacts or artificial tears.  

Next up, the “natural remedies” collective.

Easy, Natural Remedy

Add those words to your human spam filter.  “Easy, natural, remedy”.

These things are usually so painful to anyone even mildly familiar with related biology and science, that you may sanely choose to not even read whatever ‘solution’ is on offer.

Here’s one:

Right after I said …   Ok, fine, nevermind.

Here’s that thread.

I don’t even know where to begin with that one.  The flimsiest pretense of a scientific explanation, without anything backing it up of course, followed by some super secret handshake-exercise-routine-procedure-to-unlock-the-unicorn.  

Created by unicorn farmers, for unicorn farmers.

Thing is, once you start paying attention to your eyes, anything besides staring at screens, your vision will temporarily improve a little bit.  Ciliary spasm, kittehs.  You know the drill.

And here again, painfully pointless nonsense pseudo science.  “Reset the very eye vs. visual cortex connection”.  You can bet mom’s farm that Amar doesn’t know a whole lot about vision biology.

It’s perfectly ok to start out lost and confused, we all did.  But then you do want to see people starting to question the nonsense once it’s pointed out to them.  By a cranky, cranky eye guru (using the term of course, Inception style … making light of all of the well intentioned unicorn breeders dreaming of a simpler time, filled with herbs and wizards).  

Cheers,

-Jake