So I was at the shopping mall today, and chanced upon a booth where a salesgirl was promoting ‘pinhole spectacles’. It’s just a pair plastic spectacles, instead of having lens, it has numerous holes scattered across it. Here’s a webbie: http://www.thebatesmethod.com/
The claims on the posters were that the glasses helps in remedying long-sightedness, short-sightedness, lazy-eye and the list goes on. Not believing, I try on a pair and wow, things do become clearer. I could read at a distance normally impossible without my glasses.
I guess I know why it works - it’s something like squinting your eyes when you can’t see clearly. But does it really helps to reduce your degree?
I just went to browse the web-site – Guess the spectacles wouldn’t help to reduce the degree, but is their Bates Method. Whether it works or not I have no idea, but it’s quite costly – I rather save up for laser surgery, if I am that desperate not to wear spectacles.
The pinhole method isn’t at all like the Bates method (which is a series of "eye exercises that Martin Gardner was exposing as improbable and unproven half a century ago) – it works, as I note, by restricting the pupil area so that pupil-dependent aberrations are minimized. It really does woerk like squinting, but it also severely reduces the incoming light. A well-corrected set of refractive goggles doesn’t reduce the incoming light and actually works better than pinhole glasses. The advantage of pinhole glasses is that they’ll work for any prescription (and, for some rare unfortunate folks with very distorted eyes, it’s actually an overall better choice, I understand), and they’re cheap. But it doesn’t rely on eye exercises or the like.