The Truth About Myopia

The chair of the Department of Evolutionary Human Biology at Harvard has an interesting thing to say about myopia:

“Nearsightedness is a complex trait caused by many interactions among a large number of genes and multiple environmental factors.
However, since people’s genes haven’t changed much in the last few centuries, the recent worldwide epidemic of myopia must result primarily from environmental shifts.
Of all the factors identified, the most commonly identified culprit is close work:intent focusing fro long periods of time on nearby images such as sewing and words on a page or screen.”’

Now, his opinion here is not much more than any layman’s. In fact, there are studies going back over 40 years, clearly defining what causes myopia, and how myopia gets worse. He wouldn’t be a person to quote here, save for one fact – it’s basically common sense that myopia isn’t a failure of your body. There is nothing wrong with you, genetically. It’s the environment that is causing your nearsightedness. We didn’t have myopia as a real problem even fifty years ago – and yet today, a few short decades later, it affects over 2 billion people!

What changed? Only our lifestyle, and the degree to which prescriptions are used to combat the resulting symptom.

The very simple reason that nobody you talk to has any answers (besides selling you fancy lens coatings and stronger prescriptions), is that the answer isn’t profitable.

What kind of university will train doctors to become obsolete? What kind of funding will a university receive, the findings of which would destroy a 100 billion dollar a year industry? This isn’t conspiracy theory – it’s the simple economic reality, that everybody has bills to pay. The whole thing happened organically, slowly and over time, responding to a symptom that on a retail level, was always being sold by selling you something (glasses, contact lenses, and lately surgery). It’s the way most human problems happen – with no real malice, and slowly and progressively enough to keep us from ever looking at the big picture.

There is nothing evil in this. Everybody involved just has a very small part. There are people in a lab, making a better lens. Marketers creating sales brochures. Optometrists studying how to prescribe lenses, in school. Shareholders asking for higher profits. There isn’t a job description for “the big picture of human eyesight health”.

But let’s not get too philosophical. I just want to very briefly answer the question as to “why have I never heard of this before”.

And indeed, you can find out a whole lot about myopia, that’s clinically researched and meaningful. You would want to go to scholarly.google.com, and search for the term “near induced transient myopia” (or NITM – that’s the established medical term for how all myopia starts). You’ll find hundreds of studies, defining without question, that myopia is first a close-up strain symptom (a temporary, or “transient” one, at that).

Soon you may find yourself satisfied at having uncovered the cause of myopia (so very well known to medical science, it boggles the mind that absolutely none of this makes it into the public consciousness). Then you would go on to research the term “lens induced myopia”, which is how all NITM (near induced transient myopia) is currently being treated – and as a result, causing more myopia.

Hundreds upon hundreds of studies, from all the major universities and well thought of doctors, showing unequivocally one thing: You start to wear lenses to correct NITM, you just get more myopia.

It’s entirely undeniable. The facts and proof, accumulated, repeated, independently verified for over four decades now, all say the same thing. There is no dispute. There is no question.

There is also no profit. Many hundreds of thousands of jobs would be gone, and a whole highly profitable industry wiped out, if we took these two very, very simple facts, and applied a logical treatment plan based on it. Nobody would benefit from this who works in the industry. So even if you do a study that shows how to stop myopia, find the answer like the hundreds of clinicians before you, where do you take it? Who will fund further research, or a public service campaign, which would suggest that the current treatment is all wrong? That the right treatment would eliminate the whole industry in a single generation? Would Apple make a product that would make people never buy more Apple products?

If you were in the lens business, you wouldn’t want that presentation in your office. If you own lens stock in your retirement portfolio, that would be just bad news. Nobody wants to hear it.

All the things I will show you here, don’t require you to spend a lifetime wearing glasses, or destroying your eyes with laser surgery. All the things I show you here, together, may cost you a few Euro, or dollars. They’ll take a bit of time and commitment, which many people don’t want to hear. That’s the only real caveat, the only catch – your time.

So if you read this far, and want to get on to working on your eyes, it’s time we dive into the actionable parts of this guide.

Next up, we will look at exactly how your eyesight gets worse. Exactly, specifically how. And what you can do to stop your myopia from progressing. This is as simple as it’s common sense, once you read about it.

See you tomorrow!  

Meanwhile, if you haven’t read about the myopia lie yet, it’s quite worthwhile:  http://courses.endmyopia.org/the-myopia-lie/