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Comment by skue | Hacker News Reader

This article includes interviews from multiple experts, citing data from both retrospective and case control studies, plus the pandemic which effectively provided an even broader, country-wide study that again matched their data.

I’d love to understand why you would post such a dogmatic dismissal without so much as a citation. Are you an ophthalmology researcher yourself who is familiar with contrary and well-vetted research? Are you someone with a strong personal experience that you have a hard time squaring with the data? Or are you someone who forms strong beliefs, firmly held, regardless of whatever new information life offers?

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Found these for the curious.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6328548/

https://www.nih.gov/news-events/news-releases/low-dose-atrop...

> I’d love to understand why you would post such a dogmatic dismissal without so much as a citation

Is this your first time on hacker news?

Indeed.

As someone with an education in healthcare, nothing goes off the rails, and I mean really off the rails like a health related thread on HN.

You get some of the most ardent believers in some of the wildest hypotheses who are quick to dismiss a century or more of actual data.

That’s not to say that some early hypotheses won’t turn out to be correct, but there is a big difference between “I read this interesting paper with an interesting hypothesis” and “Hey guys, all of current medicine is 100% wrong and your doctor is conspiring to keep the truth from you (or so inept they probably can’t tie their own shoe).”

Emmitropization is a fact. Peripheral over focus causing myopia is well documented and peripheral defocus is also well studied. Peripheral defocus lenses and low dose atropine are well studied. The mechanism is understood, and proved by multiple different ways to interfere with the mechanism.

Optometrists are clothing salespeople. Only some ophthalmologists even know about atropine as an option.

Yup. If you spend time all day at a computer but never wear glasses, I can magically guess that your prescription is around -2. That's not a coincidence, just calculate the focal length and it comes out to exactly the computer screen distance.

And when you wear your full prescription without correcting for target distance, you just restart the process all over again. For some lucky people the axial length seems to be fixed after some point, but for most people that sets them on the path of increasing power.

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