A friend of mine once told me that he didn’t believe in glasses. He said that it just made your eyesight worse, and that if you tried to get along without them, you’d function a lot better, and your eyesight would be better, than if you had them.
Some people apparently agree with him. I have vague memories of seeing or reading about books and such (on an infomercial?) that promises to let you get rid of your glasses for good, and improve your eyesight, without corrective lenses or surgery. If I remember correctly, their method is basically eye exercises (though I don’t recall if that’s the only thing).
All of this sounds pretty fishy to me. Is there any scientific evidence that corrective lenses cause worsening eyesight, or that any sort of common vision problem can be improved without them? Even if there was, would such a method also address eye problems directly correlated with, say, nearsightedness (such as detached retina)?
American Board of Opticians Certified here. Wearing glasses will not worsen myopia (nearsightedness), hyperopia (farsightedness), astymatism, or presbyopia (the reason people need reading glasses as they get older). The first three are caused when the shape of your cornea does not focus correctly on your retina. Presbyopia is a weakening of the muscles used to focus the crystalline lens. Wearing glasses cannot change, for better or for worse, the shape of your cornea, and have no affect whatsoever on the actual muscles in your eye. Your brain becomes dependent on corrective lenses, but they don’t do anything at all to your actual eye.
Other vision disorders, however, such as amblyopia, could be affected by corrective lenses. That’s why kids with lazy eyes wear eye patches. But again, that change takes place in the brain and not the eye.
Woah…first post under the new system for me. I was taken aback there for a moment.
Anyhoo, I once heard an eye doctor talking about this. He said this all got started because there is an extremely rare type of farsightedness that’s caused by weak eye muscles and can, in fact, be cured through eye exercises. Hucksters grabbed ahold of this and have been pitching it to people for whom the exercises will do nothing.