A quick word of warning: While writing this post, I am finding myself in a bit of a disagreeable mood. Keep this in mind while reading. I do generally try to be calm and maintain a peaceful distance of the “myopia is irreversible” crowd of esteemed professionals.
Today is not one of those days, though …
Every day I see people wearing glasses. In most places, it is as many as half. I have to assume that many of the rest of them are wearing contact lenses. I see parents taking their children into optic shops. Classrooms with eight year olds, wearing glasses, looking at text books at the shortest of distances.
Being in this “business”, I can not help but notice all the myopia, nothing if not further spreading, affecting most everyone around us. Vision, being such a key human sense, being senselessly overmedicated, marginalized, treated by many professionals as a poorly functioning nuisance of the human body. Meanwhile, I dream of billboards, advertising an alternative to this clear eyesight rental racket that is being propagated in every shopping mall.
The real problem with myopia is of course, that we never address the core cause of the bad eyesight symptoms: Eye strain and incorrect prescription use.
Instead, we are encouraged to mask the symptom, with glasses, contact lenses, or laser surgery. As just about every single individual who has taken that advice has found out, this simply does not work. What other medical treatments do we not question, where the symptom continues to get worse, as we accept the ‘treatment’ we are prescribed?
It is sometimes frustrating, from my perspective, to converse with optometrist practitioners. The problem is not complex, nuanced, or requiring a doctorate study to see. You prescribe a treatment, the patient gets worse. How is that supposed to look, to any logical, reasonable individual?
“Oh, but there is nothing else we can do”, they shrug in response. “Myopia just happens.”
Come on, can this seriously be an answer? Do we have over a billion cancer-equivalent cases here, with our eyesight? Are human eyes just designed to fail, for a majority of us, by our teen years? Irreversibly, and coincidentally profitably, for a multi-billion Euro lens manufacturing industry?
Consider this: You have a rash on your arm. You go to your doctor. Your doctor prescribes a topical cream. You use it. Your rash spreads. What do you do?
Do you a) go back to the doctor, have him prescribe you more of that topical cream, and just watch the rash spread?
Or b), do you look for an alternate solution? Does something logical and sane in your head suggest that the doctor, and his cream, are probably not the answer to your rash? What if the doctor said that human skin just doesn’t last well beyond our teens, and rashes can not be stopped, only slowed down, by the use of this (rather expensive) cream?
Of course in the case of myopia, the problem is that almost all doctors you find (in retail outlets, with heavy advertising of fashion frames, purely coincidentally), tell you that skin just doesn’t work, and rash cream is the only answer.
But, I will stop complaining about this bit of medical lunacy, and let Andreas express his findings instead. Andreas, a myope with an about-average prescription, started the Web Program a month ago:
30 days has passed with this program. I only have unlocked up to day 25. The website is a number of days behind and then occasionally I get 5 days unlocked in a row, which kind of defeats the purpose of unlocking the program over time. That said, I am still very happy with the program.
I am a 20 years old. About a year ago I was prescribed -2,5 on my left eye and -2,25 on my right eye. Throughout that year I spend a lot of time studying, still wearing my prescription, so I assume my eyesight deteriorated further. I had an eye infection due to wearing contact lenses and then I started researching alternatives to glasses, contact lenses and laser surgery. I’ve come across the Bates method and plus lens therapy, but then I found this program I haven’t looked back since.
At day one I measured 46cm (at the evening) on the myopia calculator and I could barely work at the computer without glasses. Now 30 days later I can do (at 11:00 am) 58cm with my right eye and 52cm with my left eye. I think my right eye is a lot better at active focusing, and since it is the better eye I think my left eye sort of leaves it up to my right eye to do the work. With the Snellen chart I can (at 11:00 am) read 20/13 with a -1,5 prescription and read 20/25 with a -1 prescription (my -2 glasses and +1 reading glasses). Right now I have a pair of -2 glasses and a pair of -1,5 glasses – I think it might be time to get a new pair.
All emphasis mine, for the quick readers. The original forum thread is here.
So Andreas had a -2.50 prescription, the rash cream of doom, a year ago. But it turns out that just after a month of following a rather simple Web Program, with no exams using expensive auto refractors, no shrugs of “sorry human eyes just don’t work”, Andreas could pass a driver’s license exam with less than half of the prescription given to him by his optometrist a year ago.
Considering the simple nature of the Web Program, we can safely rule out the possibility that I am some mystic shaman from the Far East, descended from a misty mountain after a lifetime of meditation and wisdom. Instead, we may have to come to the more logical conclusion that healthy eyesight is about The Four Pillars and is easily formulated into an actionable step by step program, somewhat arrogantly titled, the #endmyopia Method.
You don’t even need that. Others have easily discovered all of this, and offer similar suggestions (excluding nonsense like the Bates Method, unfortunately popular as a partial premise solution it might be).
I am working on a small interview series to bring some of these other voices of reason, available from various blogs and Websites, into the picture. My goal is to continue making this site into a resource (hence the growing blog, and forum) that offers a sane alternative to the rash-cream contingent (completely coincidentally, take a look at this post comparing Apple stores to optometrist offices).
Also and as a final note, there are a vast number of excellent and trustworthy professionals to help with your eyesight concerns. I recommend specifically looking at behavioral ophthalmologists for serious insights, rather than relying entirely on what you might find at the typical chain-store franchise optic shop.
Enjoy! (and consider sharing posts like this one, with myopes you care about)
