I don't buy it. I'm guessing most of us here can read this just fine:
My wife and I are very nearsighted, but I cannot explain why our kids do not need glasses.
Being indoors more and more is only part of the problem. It’s what one does while indoors that makes a bigger impact on vision (i.e. being in front of computer monitors for hours on end, watching television constantly, etc.). Or, at least, that’s what I think.
I blame Congress. :)
For more than a hundred years it's been well known that you can go to a remote area where almost no one is nearsighted, introduce a certain function to them, and within 50 years near sightedness will be over 30%.
That function?
Reading.
Unfortunately, forcing your eyes to focus closely on the printed page has the effect of eventually making them longer. Groups that focus primarily at a distance, and have no real reason for close focusing, have practically no nearsighted members.
In all the parts of the world we've gone to "civilize" nearsightedness followed shortly thereafter.
As one who has worn glasses since I was 13, I do believe this whole piece is poppycock. We didn’t even have a tv until I was 15. And, I spent lots of hours in the sun. Balderdash!!!!!
So taking the children to the beach can save lots of money in optometrists at long term? Sounds good to me.
Nothing new under the sun?
BELOW is a transcript of pages 169-170 from the book TOTAL VISION which I read way back in the early 80’s .
Light, in addition to being necessary for vision, stimulates both the pituitary and pineal glands and possibly other regions of the mid-brain which control the endocrine system and the production of hormones. It is not only the portion of the spectrum which we can see that is important, but also the bands that are present but not visible to the naked eye. The process is not unlike the photosynthesis of plants. Without certain ultraviolet wavelengths human hormone production is altered.
Several researchers working at various medical centers and laboratories throughout the country have found that when any part of the natural sunlight spectrum is blocked from entering the eye for a long period of time, abnormalities may develop. Women living above the Aortic Circle, where the night goes on for three months at a stretch during the winter, are likely to become infertile then because they stop ovulating. When sunlight returns, so does fertility.
Perhaps the most startling relationship disclosed concerning limited-spectrum lighting is the linking to it of some types of cancer. At least a half-dozen animal studies have come up with the same conclusion: reduced spectrum lighting influences the growth and the incidence of some types of cancer. Anything other than the full spectrum appears to change the course of nature.
And when the few reports of remission of terminal cancer in humans are looked at, a connecting link in a number of the cases appears to be getting plenty of natural sunlight. The people decided to spend their last days outdoors in the sun. One such story was reported a dozen years ago in TIME magazine: the man quit going to his office and started reading in a rocking chair on his back porch and tending roses in his garden. His cancer disappeared.
In a 1959 study with 15 cancer patients at Bellevue Medical Center in New York City, the doctor conducting the research said that while it was difficult to make a definite evaluation, it was her opinion and that of her assistants that 14 of the patients showed no further growth of the cancerous tumors after spending a summer outdoors as much as possible, without wearing sunglasses or prescription lenses.
Subsequently, it was learned that the one patient whose condition detiorated at the expected rate did not understand the instructions and had continued to wear her prescription lenses when outdoors. The glasses naturally blocked the ultraviolet rays from reaching her eyes.
It appears that not only do we need sunlight on our skin to provide vitamin D from the ultraviolet rays, we also need invisible rays to reach our eyes, where the nerve fibers in the retina react to stimulate the master glands of the body. (Longwave blacklight ultraviolet rays are the beneficial ones; shortwave ultraviolet, which is filtered from natural sung light by the atmosphere before reaching us, is so harmful to living tissue that lamps which emit only those bands are used to sterilize implements. Shortwave ultraviolet is also the spectrum emitted from sunlamps, and it has been shown in animal tests that the over-exposure is harmful, possibly causing skin cancer.)
A prominent light researcher, John Ott, tells in his book, Health Light, of a conversation he had with the daughter of the late Dr. Albert Schweitzer:
” Our conversation dwelt mostly on her experiences as assistant to her father at Lambarene, on the west coast of Africa. I asked her about the rate of cancer of the people in that area, and she replied that when her father had first started the hospital, they found no cancer at all, but that now it was a problem. I asked if the people living there had started installing glass windows and electric lights in their otherwise simple surroundings and she said they had not.
“Then I half jokingly asked her if any of the natives wore sunglasses. She looked startled and then told me that the natives paddling their dugout canoes up and down the river in front of the hospital often wore no more than a loin cloth and sunglasses and indeed, some wore only the sunglasses. she further explained that sunglasses represented a status symbol of civilization and education and had a higher bartering blue than beads and other such trinkets. There is, of course, no scientific proof of a correlation between the wearing of sunglasses and cancer, but it does raise an interesting question.”
I don't buy it. I'm guessing most of us here can read this just fine:
bkmk
Nearsightedness is caused by the deformation of the shape of the eyeball that occurs when the eye muscles can’t relax. That’s why eye exercises work - they gently induce relaxation. This isn’t mystical mysteriousness. It’s based on the really complex observation of the behavior of all the other muscles in the body, and the jump of incredible insight and genius that says, “hey, maybe eye muscles are... muscles.”
Optometrists and opthamalogists (generally) call eye exercises bunk. But after doing eye exercises and getting rid of my glasses, I call optometrists and opthamalogists (generally) bunk.
Think it through - reading inside stresses the eye muscles in exactly the same way for many hours each day. What if you took a weight and did one arm exercise with it for the same number of hours each day - even a very light weight? You know what woud happen to your arm. So if your arm got tense, tight, spasmed, or otherwise unable to relax, would you do exercises to relieve it’s tightness and stretch it back into relaxation? Or would you follow the doctors orders and wear a sling for the rest of your life?
Makes some sense.
Nearsighted me grew up in Cleveland, Oh where it’s perpetually cloudy.