Ming’s Wisdom

Last night I woke up at 3am, itchy with a few small rashes on several parts of my body. I didn’t know what caused it, but didn’t really get a chance to think about it either since I was still half conscious. But the itchiness increased, and I started to sneeze, a lot. In addition, my eyes felt bulging with pressure, almost like when I’ve had pollen allergies in the past, though pollen should have been much weaker. During the hour when the feeling was most intense, I had plenty of time to think over all the things I did to cause this, and figured it out; it was the walnuts I ate.

So I had walnut allergies, which was a new discovery, but not quite as profound as the one that came right after. At this point my eyes were bulging, feeling like a balloon filled with a little too much air. But what startled me was that I could see everything in my room with stunning clearness, and could distinguish tiny details in all the objects in my sight. I normally am near-sighted, so anything further than about a foot away should start to blur a bit without glasses or contacts, but last night I wasn’t wearing any. And this, I believe, was the last piece of the puzzle that finally came together, in my contemplations about eyesight.

If you’ve ever had near-sightedness, and most people have it to some degree, then you know the standard speech that optometrists give you. Usually near-sightedness comes when you are young, gets progressively worse during the teenage years, and as you get older it slows down and stabilizes. There is no way to reverse it. Please, try on these new glasses and contact lenses, and if putting them on everyday is too much trouble for your daily routine, you should get Lasik surgery. Near-sightedness is caused by the eye ball changing shape, so that the front of the eye is further away from the back of the eye than it should be. The front of the eye ball, acting as a lens, no longer focuses light correctly onto the back of the eye. That’s why you need to get the front of your eye cut with a laser to adjust its curvature for the new shape of your eye, says the friendly neighborhood optometrist.

Forming around the lens of the eye, there’s an elastic ring of ligaments that pushes outwards called the “zonula” (for focusing far), as well as a ring of “ciliary” muscle that contracts to squeeze the eye ball to be longer front to back (for focusing near)(1). As with any muscle, the more exercise it gets, the stronger the muscle becomes. For most people with near-sightedness, their ciliary muscle is a hunk of beefed up machine that never turns off. With ciliary muscles exerting much stronger force than the zonula that tries to balance them, what you end up with is the inability to focus on far-away objects anymore. Several burning questions follow: Why would this happen to so many people? What did people do before the invention of glasses? Are there lions in the Serengeti that can’t see too far, and aren’t they disadvantaged in terms of ability to hunt? Well, following the mechanics of the eye’s focusing described above, near-sightedness would not have been a problem until fairly recently in human history. In recent centuries, our lifestyle has increasingly resulted in our eyes looking at closer and closer objects. We started with an outdoor lifestyle, and moved to one of houses with walls enclosing us on all sides, of reading tiny words printed on paper, of writing on friend’s walls… on Facebook. These close activities have a huge effect on our ability to focus on the far away (2). Our eyes almost never get a chance to relax and focus on objects further away, when everywhere we go there’s something a foot in front of us to look at.

My understanding is that if you don’t use a muscle, it gradually weakens. Relaxing the eye for long periods of time, by looking off into the sky, or at distant trees, can stop near-sightedness. And eventually reverse it. It’s my strong suspicion that if you were to quit your job and go sightseeing in open meadows and hills for six months, when you come back your eyes will be much less near-sighted. All that time looking at far away objects relaxes the ciliary muscles and lets them slowly degenerate, weakening to a state where the zonula can resume its effect on pushing the eye back into shape for focusing on far away objects. I still have a lot to research concerning this subject, but I’m very surprised that no optometrist I’ve seen has ever been able to explain this to me, that a whole industry has sprouted to correct the symptoms of something while ignoring the guiding principles behind its workings.

For those of you who would like to do something about it, I would recommend reading these two books listed at the end of the article. Although I am proud to have made this discovery through my own random experiences (and through my sister’s science experiment, thank you Cara!), over ninety years ago Dr. William Bates first published his findings on the principles I’ve glossed over. The first book is a re-publication of the original book by William Bates, while the second book is a modern expansion of the Bates method, with steps on how to improve your eyesight through exercises. I will be getting these books and following the exercises in them, and I can update you all on the results as things progress.

The Bates Method for Better Eyesight Without Glasses
Relearning to See: Improve Your Eyesight — Naturally!

References:
(1) http://www.pc.ibm.com/ww/healthycomputing/vdt13eyeb.html
(2) http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=1059711

This entry was posted on Monday, March 2nd, 2009 at 20:45 and is filed under Health. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.