Imagine your young child rapidly loosing his/her eyesight.  

This is a horrible story.  If you have young children that you care about, you might not want to read this one.  Because this is all about the standard ignorance and profit seeking joke that is mainstream retail optometry.  And it sucks.

Oh Jake, they say.  Calm down.  Focus on the positive.

You know though, one of the things that keeps me going, spending time on this resource day in day out, is exactly not the positive.  It’s all the e-mails of what amounts to destroying innocent people’s eyes.  People who trust the establishment, who trust the whole “medical” theme, just to be sold this total shit, some ghetto-a$$ 16th century not-medical-at-all invention, a thing from the dark ages, today totally un-ironically promoted as a medical treatment.  Ruins your eyes, every time.

It’s such a disgusting farce.

And yea, you’re right.  It’s not the only farce.  A whole lot of Western retail medicine is a farce and symptom treatment and just selling pills.  I get that.  

But as they say, pick your battles.

Here’s what this whole rant is about:

Disgrace, all of it.

Of course you already know all about myopia and how the eye works and stimulus and the whole giant fallacy that is the use of minus lens focal plane changes.  Yes, tons of Internet anti establishment conspiracies are just crazy talk.  Yes, you want to be skeptical and not do a whole lot of the questionable “alternative health” things that are out there.  Both sides are equally fraught with imbeciles and questionable ideas.

But we live in an age where you’re just one quick Google Scholar search away from all the science you could possibly want to read.  Educate yourself.  Make wise choices.

These lens sellers will absolutely ruin your children’s eyes, given the chance.  It took this kid 8 months to go to -3 diopters, and also have astigmatism.  Do you want to even think about where he’ll be in another year?  Where he’ll be by the time he’s 15?

And then you get all the issues of poor development of fine motor control, of social anxieties, and the physical risks of retinal detachment and the myriad other issues that come with high myopia.

Educate yourself.  Don’t take my word for things.  Look at vision biology, look at how eyes are designed to respond to stimulus.  Read all you can.  Keep your kids away from the insanity.

*Caveat:  I’d take my child to the ophthalmologist for regular checkups.  It’s just the myopia management specifically that I don’t condone and frequently rant about.  But as for catching other issues early, the mainstream definitely is appropriate – though ideally not from a place though that’s 90% a glasses showroom and run by glorified lens sellers.

Cheers,

-Jake