Stopping the Shortsigtedness Epidemic | Hacker News Reader

Stopping the Shortsigtedness Epidemic

newscientist.com

68 pointsrfreytag18 comments

About 17 years ago I took instruction from a teacher of the Bates Method (as refined by some woman whose name I cannot recall). It’s a lot of work. You can expect to put at least an hour a day into it if you want any results. My results were a big improvement, but not an improvement to even close to 20/20 after about a year, so I lapsed and my eyesight eventually deteriorated back to very myopic. I went from -7.25d for 20/20 to -2.00d for 20/40. Not correcting your vision for perfect 20/20 with lenses is one part of the method, and I also tired of never having perfectly corrected vision.

"Outdoor seeing" has a big role in the Bates method with emphasis on horizon focusing and outdoor lighting, as mentioned in this article too, but as well as brighter light, Bates put emphasis on full-spectrum natural lighting. I went so far as to buy full spectrum light bulbs for my house. Unfortunately I could never come up with a good solution for doing computer work in natural lighting. Bates had some downright wrong ideas, so his entire work was never taken seriously by established medicine.

During this time I also ran across an Israeli teacher of his own method (pretty much the same as Bates), who liked to say he had a blind certificate from the state of Israel and a driver’s license from the state of California, and he didn’t wear any corrective lenses. However, when his son was born with the same defect he had, he had his son undergo an operation removing the lenses and making his son dependent on contact lenses. He said the natural vision thing was just too hard and he didn’t want his son going through it.

I have also benefited from the Bates Method (at least portions of it). The new findings about spending time outdoors particularly accord with Bates' idea that sunlight is beneficial to eyesight. Bates said that pointing the head towards the sun and swinging the closed eyes through the path of its rays could relax muscles in the eye. It feels good but I never spent much time purposefully doing it. Instead, the biggest benefit for me was the knowledge of eyestrain and the damage that over-prescribed lenses could do if used in close-work for prolonged periods. I saved my vision from deteriorating further by reducing my prescription and even wearing reading glasses over my contact lenses while reading in order to reduce the prescription (negative diopters in the contacts plus positive in the reading glasses = reduced prescription).

I'm still longing for a time when I can take off my glasses and live outdoors for an extended period to see if I can manage some real reversal of my nearsightedness.

With longer eyeball you don't tire muscles in your eye by looking at close objects so it's actually a gain not a loss.

I'm attributing my ability to look at screen for 8-16 hours per day, every day for last 15 years to this.

Of course progression of myopia is very bad but I think it can be almost completely attributed to wearing corrective lenses. If your eye elongated to adapt and you trash benefits of this elongation by wearing glasses without changing you lifestyle then you encourage further elongation.

Interesting, so do you wear glasses only when you need to be able to see distant things?

Before I formed my theory about myopia it progressed already to the point where I couldn't look at computer screen without glasses so not wearing them for most of the time is no longer an option for me.

Three years ago I bought myself new glasses but now I started noticing that they are no longer adequate when I have to look at distant objects. They are of course still perfect for watching computer screen. My plan is to buy myself new ones and use them only on occasions where I will need to look at distant things. For other needs I'll still use outdated ones.

I don't wear them in front of a screen because they reduce contrast an there are reflections - however clean they are. But I wear them to drive home.

As far as I am concerned I have evolved from something that needed to spot lions on the horizon to something that needs to spot trolls 0.5m away

That makes sense, but for me it would be more convenient if I could wear glasses while using the computer and not while doing other activity, which hopefully will be possible with the research that's going on.

Wait for old age! As you age your ability to focus closely gets worse (the eye muscles weaken) but your distance vision generally doesn't change much.

My experience seems somewhat consistent with this. I became moderately myopic after doing professional calligraphy for a few hours every day for a year or so (a few hundred thousand words total). But I decided not to get any glasses. Over the following years the myopia did not get worse, it improved a little.

I have both myopia and astigmatism, in which the image is warped as well as blurred. I would be interested in research to see if astigmatism is also correlated with these same factors which help induce myopia.

Also I wanted to point out the spelling error in this entry title:

"Shortsigtedness" should be "Shortsightedness"

sigh - too late for me to fix it - thanks though.

I thought this was going to be about our short-sighted vision about the future.

That isn't an epidemic, that have been with us from the beginning of time.

I'll admit it's always been here and that it's incredibly hard to measure in any case.

But still feel that shortsightedness has increased in the last twenty or thirty years. The housing bubble is closest I can come to concrete verification of this but that's a long way, I'll admit.

It would be nice if someone could do a study akin to Bowling Alone, to study shortsightedness instead of social isolation.

At least you can do something useful with a house, even when its value drops 50%. The 17th century Dutch imploded their economy with tulips.

Myopia is one of the characteristics of bright but late-talking children that Thomas Sowell talks about In his book, "The Einstein Syndrome: Bright Children Who Talk Late" (http://www.amazon.com/Einstein-Syndrome-Bright-Children-Talk...). Other characteristics include above-average math and music abilities, good memories, and strong wills.

I've had to wear glasses since I was in preschool. Anecdotally, of course, I doubt conditions had that much to do with my poor eyesight.

Ah well. One day I'll get Lasik.

Equally anecdotally, I've spent pretty much the entirety of my 34 year long life indoors, either staring at a book or staring at a computer screen and my eyesight is absolutely perfect.

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