The Truth About Myopia

original article

"By using a hood to restrict the vision of monkeys so that they could not see more than fifteen inches (38 cm) from the eye, it was found that most of them develop myopia after a few months' time, just as humans do. Monkeys living in the wild, on the other hand, do not develop myopia."

"Numerous researchers have found a higher incidence of myopia in girls than in boys. Heredity need not be the reason for this. It can be explained by the fact that boys have traditionally spent more time in outdoor sports activities while girls have more frequently turned to sewing, knitting and other close-work activities."

"At one time, most of the lenses produced by optical companies were plus lenses to correct hyperopia or presbyopia. Minus lenses to correct myopia made up only a small percentage of their production. Now this situation has reversed, and far more minus lenses than plus lenses are produced."

Reminiscing Childhood Optician Visits

When I was a child, I hated visiting the opticians as much as the dentists. The whole idea of being physically examined, and then corrected, filled my adolescent body with an anxiety that went beyond the fear of school tests and exams. No amount of studying can yield a good result for eye and teeth examinations; except with regular maintenance and care, I could never expect a good outcome for something that seemed outside of my control.

I started wearing glasses at about age thirteen - quite a late age to start for most children - and by that age, I had already become fully aware of my outward appearance to others, so that in vanity, I was quite self-conscious whenever I needed to use my spectacles; therefore, in an effort to avoid the playground taunts of 'four eyes', or as I imagined other kids to judge me, I only wore my glasses when I deemed it necessary.

My mother knew that I didn't wear my glasses all the time, and to my betrayal, reported this to the optician during my eye examination. The optician who was in her late-twenties, starting out this new business venture with her husband, scolded me - "If you don't wear your glasses all the time, your eyesight will get worse!" Those words, that I never felt the need to question, stayed imprinted on my mind for many years after.

The truth is, that even though I did what the optician said, by obediently wearing my glasses - all the time, my eyesight still continued to deteriorate! So, now I realize that I have been lied to, I wonder if my eyesight would have been better if I hadn't started wearing glasses at all. For certain, I did have better vision as a child, but I can only speculate that wearing glasses for all these years have weakened and strained my eye muscles, so that they have 'forgotten' how to focus correctly.

Natural Eyesight Healing: Day One

Over the past month or so, I have been considering to have eye sight correction by Lasik surgery, but because I have an aversion to any type of surgery, I decided to look up alternative treatments to improve my sight. I suffer from myopia (short-sightedness), and I stumbled upon the Bates Method, which I remembered reading about from a book I borrowed when I was fourteen.

I won't go too much into it, but the underlying theory is that the muscles that are used to rotate the eyeball are under tension causing a 'squeezing' which deforms the shape of the lens creating difficulty in focusing. The Bates Method involves a combination of exercises and relaxations that are designed to train the eye to be able to see properly again. There have been many books since written, elaborating and building upon the original principle, with very optimistic results from practitioners.

I approach everything with a slight skepticism, but seeing as the underlying theory seems plausible, I'm willing to give it a go. There's no harm in trying, and the process would help me learn more about the fascinating biology of the eyes and its processes.

Before going to bed last night, I practiced some of the Bates Method eye exercises. When I woke up this morning, I resisted the temptation to grab my spectacles. Apparently, when the eyes are relaxed the vision is better, because the muscles are not deforming the eye structure - I decided to take advantage of possibly improved vision after a relaxing night's sleep. I'm quite blind without my glasses, with quite a severe myopia of more than -6.0 in each eye; so at first I felt quite handicapped unaided by them, feeling retarded and clumsy when performing my usual tasks.

After a while without them, I found that I started to develop more confidence at doing things. One feels as clumsy without glasses, as one who has been depending on crutches to walk all his life. Initially, I struggled to think to do the most simplest things like making a cup of coffee, but that may be because of the distraction of the blurred environment. But there is no reason why I couldn't perform these tasks because if a blind person can do it, then there's absolutely no reason why someone who has partial vision cannot.

I thought about the difference between people who depend on glasses and those with perfect vision. People who look through lenses all day long have built a habit of locking their eyes forward (fixating on the optimum part of the lens), so that without glasses, they tend to look as if they are staring - ie, they don't have the soft stare that perfect vision people have. People with perfect vision scan more with their eyes, the movements are miniscule, yet small enough to notice. Someone who uses glasses, rely more on the movement of their head to look at things, whereas those with perfect vision move their eyes. That small but essential differentiation, is the reason why people with perfect vision have a faster peripheral vision. I decided that I would break the habit of my locked gaze, and be more conscious to use my eyes to scan, in that way, it would also work those muscles that have perhaps atrophied over the years.

So I tried reading a book, it was possible but uncomfortable because I held the novel so close to my eyes that I could smell the ink. When I used the computer, I had set my font size to 150%, and activated the magnifying tool, but even then it was difficult to read the screen without compromising my posture, so I decided to use my glasses for now whenever I used the computer - but removing my glasses when away from the screen to use the toilet or get a glass of water, etc.

Luckily, I have a mild obsessive compulsive order which makes it easy for me to keep up with things like these tedious eye exercises. These repetitive eye exercises which involve moving the eye up/down, left/right, clockwise/anticlock, etc, I imagine, are designed to mimic the natural eye movements of a full sighted person that us short-sighted people lack. I didn't expect to see any immediate improvements in vision after doing the exercises, especially after such a short time, but my eyes certainly did feel a lot more looser, as if someone had lubricated my eye sockets.

I've always had a fear of being blind in public, so I decided to challenge that fear and go out to lunch without the aid of my glasses - although I brought them along incase I needed to read anything. At first, I felt quite uncomfortable going outside without glasses, almost naked, and when I'm not wearing my glasses, I never know what to do with my eyes, they automatically lock into that straight forward, mannequin gaze. People appear as a blur to me, but I'm able to see enough to avoid a collision. I mimic the eyes of someone who can see, scanning my environment as if every object was sharp. It's easy just to stare blankly straight on because when everything is a blur, it's not very interesting, but I decided to be interested in the different types of blurs and fuzzy shapes. I managed to enter the mall without smacking my face into a glass door.

I feared my vision would be even more limited indoors, and I was right. As soon as I entered the mall from the sunny outside, the contrast between objects became even fuzzier and abstract. I got the feeling of jumping in at the deep end, but I decided that I'd feel more comfortable once I got used to it. I didn't collide with anyone, and I also made the effort to keep looking around, gazing into shop windows as I passed them. When everything is blurry, it's tempting just to isolate the larger shapes and ignore the smaller ones. Textures, words, and small collections of objects are extremely demoralising when you're half blind, but I decided that I would make a concerted efforted to 'scan' them, and not look like a semi-blind person stumbling through a mall, but more like a shopper taking a leisurely stroll. After a while, my eyes became more comfortable and relaxed, and after having lunch, I found that I could even read some of the text from the billboards at a distance. I could also begin to 'decipher' textile patterns on clothing, and start defining people's faces, although still blurry, I had the confidence to look at them, rather than avoid them as 'too difficult'.

I don't know if by this method I'll ever have perfect vision; I've read some people claim to go from 20/500 to 20/30 - 20/40. But I'll be happy with 'functional' vision, where I can perform daily tasks without depending on my glasses. I'll keep up this experiment for now, just to ... see. Off with my glasses again.