I get emails sometimes and hear about people who claim to have improved their eyesight to the point that they no longer require glasses. Is this stuff true. I wear reading glasses, and it seem my eyes continue to weaken. I’d love to get my eyes back to wear they were ten years ago. Can some eye exercises do this? Is it possible? Or is it yet another scam? What’s the straight dope?
No. No. Yes.
Most vision problems are caused by problems with the shape of the eye or the lens. The exercises can’t change that, and more than wiggling your ears change change their shape.
There used to be (and probably still are) people who subscribed to a model of the eye in which focusing is achieved, not by ciliary muscles changing the shape of the lens, but by the larger muscles attached to the outside of the eyeball distorting the entire eyeball. They believed that, by exercising and training those muscles, you could correct both myopia and presbyopia and throw your glasses away.
Don’t ask me why anybody ever believed the eye worked that way, or why many persisted long after the belief was shown to have no basis in fact.
(Wearing my close-up glasses as I write this, because working at the computer wearing my regular glasses gives me eye strain and a headache.)
A few points here.
I have never heard of anybody who believed the normal focussing of the eye was achieved by changing the shape of the eye. That is not to say that they don’t exist, just that they are not the most common people who believe that eye excercises can correct vison.
Secondly a great many, I believe most, experts in the area are quite happy to admit the possibility that myopia is caused by a loss of muscle tone in external muscles.
We don’t have a clue why myopia occurs, we do have overwhelming evidence that it is at least 75% enviornmental and caused by not spending enough time focussing on distant objects. That means that something in the environment is causing people who spend too much time reading, watching TV etc. to develop myopia. One explanation for that is that eye itself or the lens changes shape with age, with the precise timing dictated by genetics. That change is shape is what causes myopia. Normally the body corrects for that by applying tension to the external muscles and changing the shape of the eyball to compensate. A lack of time spent focussing on distant objects causes those muscles to atrophy and also leads to a lack of coordination. That manifests as myopia.
There’s nothing in there that requires that focussing is achieved by anything other than the ciliary muscles. This is the belief that remains current amongst medical scientists, and it’s as good an hypothesis of what causes myopia as any other. And that is the only hypothesis I have ever heard put forward by people who believe in excercise for correcting myopia.
Having said all that, the evidnce that excercises can coorrect myopia is prety thin on the ground and uch of it’s contradictory. It hasn’'t been disproven at this stage but it certainly hasn’t been proven. It sure didn’t work for me. But it is worth noting that the idea itself isn’t based on the misundertsnading of physiology that you outlined. The theory itself is perfectly consistent with everyhting we know about how the eye actually works. It’s not a woo woo hypothesis, there’s just very little evidence that it works.
Pst, I’ve had myopya since I was an itty bitty little kid. It was detected at age 10, finally.
My same-age cousin got diagnosed as having hypermetropy when she was 3.
Both of us underwent menarchy at the same time.
Both of us gained one myopic diopter at the time menarchy happened, getting her rid of glasses and making me need new ones.
Are you saying that the hormonal changes made both of us lose muscle tone in out eyeballs?
The OP has probably been receiving spam about some variation of the See Clearly Method.
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One week before my 39th birthday, I picked up a pot of lip balm to check the ingredients. I then moved the lip balm away from my body while tilting my head back, in an exact replica of the gesture my father makes when he tries to read something without his reading glasses. I then reacted in horror at what I’d done, realizing that I could now put on my bi-focals and shawl, take my geritol, and sit down to knit. This marked a real “moment” in my life. I wish there was a good solution that didn’t involve either granny glasses or an expensive trip to the eye doctor.
Sorry to ring in without any real information, I just thought I’d sympathize.
I really don’t know enough about it to comment. However it’s been well enough established that lack of time spent in long-distance focus will both cause myopia and make it worse. Whatever the ulitmate reason why this causes myopia, it seems like the simplest explanation for your experience is that puberty caused two young women to spend less time outdors than they used to.
IOW no matter what we discover to be the ultimate reason as to why people who spend a lot of time focussing on distant objects don’t develop myopia, it would seem to make little difference to your experience. Puberty causes behavioural changes and it’s not implausible that pubescent girls spend less time “playing outside on the swings and jumping rope” than pre-pubescent girls.
I’d actually be surprised if there wasn’t a puberty induced spike in the incidence of myopia, especially amongst females. Just as there is a spike amponst graduate students, an for much the same reasons.
I’ve posted this before and maybe it’s just me. I’ve spent many days out on the river taking pictures of rafts. I read while I wait. I go from reading to looking way upstream to see if there are any boats coming. I believe this eye exercise has given me eyesight that is better than I had in high school. I can read a paperback from about a foot away and have spotted a person on a bike at a distance of 3 1/2 miles. Maybe it’s just me. Still it’s like my mini superpower. 
Nope. It’s possible that, if you’re having trouble with up-close vision, there are some exercises which help (if you’re a child). This can also help treat double-vision if it’s caused by poor alignment of the eyes.
If you’re having problems with amblyopia, you can usually improve the function of the affected eye by patching the good eye, forcing the brain to pay more attention to the input from the bad eye. However, if that’s the case you’re most likely a child, and all that does is help bring you closer to normal binocular vision; it doesn’t actually do away with any myopia.
If you’re having problems with strabismus, it can be corrected by mechanically shortening or lengthening the muscles on one or both sides of the effected eye through surgery or, more recently, possibly Botox injections. (Anecdotally, this is a bit less fun to experience than it sounds.)
Beyond that I am not aware of any other ‘therapies’ to improve common vision problems. I am not a doctor, but I have asked several ophthalmologists about potential cures for all of the above, plus myopia and astigmatism*. Every time by every doctor I have been told that no, there is not some magic solution. For many vision problems, the only thing to do is monitor, wait, and correct a problem if it arises.
*Not to mention the practically-inevitable glaucoma and cataracts. Three cheers for two genetically-incompetent people breeding!