See you there!

Eliminating this stress may be impossible for many people, myself included. If your job requires reading (or if you are a student), it’s going to be very difficult to completely eliminate stress. However, you can minimize it as much as possible by looking up from whatever you are reading or writing every minute or so for a few seconds. Furthermore, good quality plus lenses (reading glasses) can be worn while reading. You should hold the material you are reading at a distance at which it is slightly blurry. This bluriness means that the plus lenses are simulating the book being just outside your normal viewing range, meaning there is zero stress on your eye.

There are numerous success stories on the web about people who reversed their myopia, but the one thing they have in common is their determination and indomitable spirit. They stuck with their original plan and remained committed to their goal of seeing clearly once again. The reason I was not able to reverse my myopia is because I did not stick to my plan. I admit, it is difficult, but it is by no means impossible.

There are also things such as “eye excersizes”. Their effectiveness is suspect, but they are by no means a closed case. The theories behind them are not very clear but I would suggest that you go to David De Angelis’ site, www.powervisionsystem.com . I have read quite a few testimonies about it, and if eye excersizes are your preferred plan of action, I would suggest it as your first destination.

I’ll post some more about other ways to reverse myopia a bit later. Good luck!

Anyways, from all that, it’s obvious that most of these vitamin pills are utterly useless, and since they’re not beneficial, they’re just more calories (they contain sugar). However, there is one vitamin pill that everybody actually should be taking; Vitamin D. Vitamin D is a very importnat factor in the growth, development, and maintenance of bones throughout one’s life. The shortage of this vitamin can cause a condition called rickets, in which the bones become soft and fracture easily, sometimes leading to deformation of the skeleton. The minimum intake to prevent rickets is 400 IU, the amount contained in the average Vitamin D pill. Vitamin D is normally synthesized by the skin in response to sunlight, but since we are spending more and more of our time indoors, we can’t synthesize enough normally, so supplements are a must. In most developed countries, however, milk is often fortified with Vitamin D as well.  As Dr. Walter Willet of the Harvard School of Public Health, when interviewed by Discover Magazine, put it,

“Vitamin D is unusual in that we don’t get it from our food: we synthesize it by being out in the sun. But our whole cultural evolution has been to remove us from sunlight. We live in houses, drive cars, work inside, watch television inside. In the northern part of the United States, even if you do go outside in the winter, the sun isn’t high enough on the horizon to activate the synthesis of vitamin D in the skin. Meanwhile, we’ve also learned that skin cancer can result from excessive radiation, so we’re now covering ourselves and putting on lotion to avoid sunburn. That further reduces the amount of vitamin D we can make. The truth is that we were made to run around in warm weather without our clothes on.”

Since we are not synthesizing enough Vitamin D from the Sun, we should be taking Vitamin D supplements every day to promote adequate bone growth and strength.

Vitamin D is without question the most important of these supplements, but following closely in importance is Omega-3 Fatty Acids. Simply put, there are three kinds of fatty acids; saturated, monounsaturated, and polyunsaturated. Omega-3 Fatty Acids are polyunsaturates, but not just any polyunsaturates; they’re the most unsaturated fatty acids in existence. The word unsaturated means that there is less than the maximum number of hydrogen atoms in the molecule. The less hydrogen atoms there are, the more liquidy and soft the fatty acid is. These more liquidy fatty acids are much better for you, because they cannot cause blockages and the like. Futhermore, the walls of your cells are composed of fatty acids. When cell walls are manufactured, they use whatever fatty acids are available. Cell walls function better when they are softer and less solid, so the ratio of Omega-3 to other fatty acids, such as Omega-6 or Omega-9 should be as high as possible. My biology teacher, for example, suffered from severe eczema all his life. Once he started taking Omega-3 Supplements, his eczema disappeared within weeks, and has not recurred since.

These two supplements are of the utmost importance to the general population. If you have a condition of some sort, or are at risk of developing a condition, other supplements may also be necessary; calcium being an example for women with osteoporosis. Thanks for reading, and don’t waste anymore money on useless vitamins and supplements.

Cholesterol is a substance that is manufactured by all your cells except for your brain cells. It plays a crucial part in the production of hormones (such as testosterone or estrogen), is the basis of all steroids, and aids in the production of vitamin D and bile salts. It has a lot of other uses, but these are among the most important. Your body produces approximately 80% of  your bodily cholesterol–the other 20% is ingested from animal sources. If you do happen to miss your daily quota of cholesterol, your body will make up for it.

Now that we’ve introduced cholesterol, let’s move on to why it’s said to be bad by people who are, no doubt, experts in their field.

Atherosclerosis is the buildup of material (knows as atheroma) along the walls of arteries, decreasing blood flow, thereby causing the heart to pump faster and harder, causing a heart attack at some point. Analysis of the atheroma shows that it is made up of white blood cell remains, calcium, cholesterol and other miscellany (e.g. connective tissue). That’s right. There is cholesterol in the material that lines and eventually clogs the arteries. However, there are also white blood cell remains and calcium. Should we stop consuming calcium? No, of course not, but this is not the basis of the argument against the cholesterol-heart disease myth…that will come soon.

To put it simply, cholesterol needs to travel around the body. The system that carries materials aroud the body is the circulatory system (arteries, veins, blood, e.t.c.) Now, cholesterol is not soluble (does not dissolve) in water, and seeing as blood is 70% water, that could pose a problem to the transportation of choloesterol. However, the body has two molecular machines to do the job; LDL and HDL (low and high density lipoprotein). Both of these proteins (functional molecules) are used to carry cholesterol through the bloog stream.  HDL is called the “good” cholesterol, because it quickly moves through the bloodstream to the liver, without interacting with anything on the way. LDL cholesterol, however, is prone to oxidation by “free radicals” (those are the things anti-oxidants are supposed to work against). Once oxidized, white blood cells interact with the LDL which is carrying the cholesterol, destroy it, and spill the cholestrol onto the walls of the artery. This whole process happens even if you were to not ingest any cholesterol, so what’s with this war against cholesterol.

The problem is, according to the mainstream scientific opinion, that consumption of excess cholesterol leads to a rise in LDL levels in the blood. Therefore, you will have a higher rate of atherosclerosis, and have heart attacks earlier in life. However, there is a gaping hole in this theory: LDL and HDL levels are in a ratio to each other. Consuming more cholesterol will cause more of both to be produced. Furthermore, HDL actually does interact with artery walls. How so? It cleans them! It also prevents LDL from getting close to the walls. This means that higher LDL levels will invariably be accompanied by higher HDL levels, and whatever increase in atherosclerosis propagated by the higher LDL levels will be matched by the maintenance performed by HDL.

However, the above point is merely a transition into the next section. All this talk of ratios of HDL and LDL in the blood has no effect whatsoever, because the consumption of more cholesterol has no effect on the blood cholestrol level! That’s right, in numerous long-term studies performed on people, the increased level of cholesterol consumption did not affect the level of cholestrol in the blood.

In addition, the total amount of LDL cholesterol in the blood has no importance. It is the level of oxidized LDL that must be considered, for that is the cholesterol that, through interactions with white blood cells, causes atherosclerosis. This shifts the subject away from cholesterol, which indeed has very little place in this discussion, and onto the subject of oxidation. To prevent this oxidation, and to prevent coronary heart disease, it is vital to follow a good diet, and that does not mean the diets that are promoted by the same people who say cholesterol is bad. You need fruits and vegetables which contain antioxidants, omega-3 fatty acids, either from fish or supplements, and you need excersize.

Cholesterol is a natural compound, synthesized by your own body in large amounts. There is a large amount of literature and experimental evidence that directly opposes the unscientific practices of the anti-cholesterol movement. This short article is by no means a comprehensive guide as to why cholesterol consumption has no effect on the health, it’s purpose is only to start you on your own journey. You may be asking, “why would they lie to us?”. Rest assured, your doctor or health adviser probably has no idea about the lack of any effect that increased cholesterol consumption has. They are simply following directions, and it is the “experts” who write these directions that need to be reviewed. While I can’t be sure what their motives are, we can assume that they’re not acting for the greater good. On a final note, Pfizer corporation made a profit of around 1.6 billion dollars from Lipitor, a statin that reduces cholesterol levels,  in 2006.

Before we delve into the mechanics of myopia, we have to start off with the dynamic nature of the human body. I will start with a simple example. Let’s look at the bicep muscle in the human arm. Imagine a man standing at a bus stop with a book in his     hands, his arms bent as he reads intently. Well, you don’t have to imagine…that’s what pictures are for. So… moving on… we know that the muscle cells in the bicep, or in any muscle for that matter, each contract on their own, and that when all the muscle cells in a muscle contract, they produce movement. So in order for the man to be holding the book, his biceps have to be in a constant state of contraction. This constant state of contraction requires a constant flow of energy, because there needs to be force applied upwards to the book to resist the actions of gravity that pull it downwards.So, the man has been standing at the bus stop for about three hours, enthralled by his book, unaware that the bus has stalled a couple hundred meters away from him, its innards expelling dark smoke. In these three hours, the muscle cells have decided that this constant state of contraction isn’t going to end any time soon, and instead of wasting energy on pulling themselves into a smaller size, they change their shape. Instead of being long when relaxed and short when contracted, they are now short when relaxed. In this way, the action of holding the book is no longer taxing the muscle cells of the bicep in terms of energy, because their relaxed state is in the short position. To zoom out into a human scale, there is no energy (for our purposes) being used to keep the arm bent.

Ten minutes later, the bus is completely repaired (the timing belt had to be changed) and arrives at the bus stop. The man looks up from his book, unaware that three hours and ten minutes have passed, and he walks onto the bus, takes the book in his left hand, and reaches into his pocket for change. Hold on! He can’t. His arm won’t move! No matter how hard he tries, his arm will not outstretch. Nevertheless, he is able to perform a complex maneuver of lifting his thigh to his bent arm and extract the quite overpriced two dollars and seventy-five cents. He goes back to his seat, and can’t help but wonder why he could not outstretch his arm. It is simple, muscle cells cannot lengthen themselves, that is, expand; all they can do is contract. Therefore, since his muscle cells’ rested state was now in the half contracted position, his muscle cells can do nothing but bend his arm more, they cannot extend it.

Of course, in due time, the muscle cells go back to normal length but the point of this true story is simple, muscles are dynamic; they adapt to whatever conditions or stresses you place them under in order to minimize the amount of energy used. The next part of this essay of sorts will talk about the actual structure of the eye, and the pieces that are necessary for the issue at hand.

The eye is a magnificent piece of biological machinery, so complex that even Darwin himself stated: “To suppose that the eye [...] could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest degree.” But for all its intricacies and complexities, one must remember that its parts operate just as any other muscle does, by contractions. I will now present a picture of the eye with its parts labelled. Do not be put off by the big words, most of them are of no concern to us right now.

The most important parts to us are the “lens”, the “cillary process” and the “cillary muscle”. Before we delve into their functions in the development of myopia, we must first understand how light is focused onto the retina by these structures. When light enters the eye through the pupil, we must envision it as rays. In the following picture, we can see the way the lens focuses the light rays directly onto the retina.

The light rays, upon being transmitted through the lens, are refracted to an angle causing them to converge directly at the fovea, which is the area of the retina with the highest concentration of light sensitive cells. When this convergence is perfect, like shown in the picture, you get a clear picture. Now, the lens’ shape is changed depending on the distance of the object which is being focused on. The muscles that move the lens are called the cillary muscles. These cillary muscles, just like any other muscle, can only contract and relax. In order to focus on an object at 20 feet or further away, the cillary muscles must be completely relaxed. As the object moves closer, the cillary muscles contract, changing the shape of the lens in order to keep focusing the light onto the fovea. The cillary muscles are attached the the actual eyeball and exert force on it as well.

At this point, we have concluded that at any distance under 20 feet, focusing on the object will cause the cillary muscles to contract and therefore exert an amount of force that increases the closer the object is to the eye. Now for the logic leap. Let’s go back to the man on the bus. While he was focusing on his book, his cillary muscles, contracting in order to pull the lens into the correct shape to focus on the book are doing the same thing that his bicep muscles were doing. There is a difference, however, in that the bicep muscles were anchored to solid bone, while the cillary muscles are anchored to the soft, malleable eyeball. Therefore, in order to minimize the amount of energy used to remain in this contracted state, the cillary muscles perform a scientifically proven phenomena; by doing what the bicep muscles did, they cause their relaxing state to become contracted, and they also cause the eyeball to elongate. The eyeball itself becomes football-shaped. In this state, there is less energy being used for the “accommodation” of the lens for the light rays; that is, the cillary muscles use a minimal amount of energy to maintain focus on the object that is nearer. Don’t forget that the closer the object is, the more stress on the eye muscles it takes to focus on it.

So, let’s just summarize everything: muscle cells which are under constant stress change their shape so that they require minimal energy to remain in the constant state. When fixed to bone, muscle cells will do all the work required to change their shape. When affixed to a gelatinous solid, such as the eyeball, the actual structure will change shape. Muscle cells and gelatinous solids which have changed shape as a result of this constant stress will revert back to normal in an amount of time dependent on the magnitude of change and the amount of time spent in the stressed state. Now, we will make the connection to myopia

Myopia is the inability to focus clearly on far away objects. Myopes have eyes that are football shaped. This means that since their cillary muscles have been stressed constantly, their eyeballs have permanently changed shape to minimize energy usage when focusing on near things. However, they can no longer focus on things in the distance clearly. A person with 20/20 vision will be able to focus on something 20 feet away with normal clarity. A myope with 20/40 vision will be able to focus on something 10 feet away with normal clarity. At 20 feet, things are blurry. Just like a fraction, a 20/40 myope has half the visual acuity of a 20/20 person. Therefore, a 20/40 myope focusing on an object at 10 feet away will have the rays being refracted just like the above diagram, converging directly on the retina, producing a clear image. Furthermore, if the object is moved, say, to five feet away, the cillary muscles can contract more, and therefore converge the rays onto the retina. So a 20/40 myope can see anything 10 feet and under with clarity. However, if we move to 15 feet, we can see the problem. Since the completely relaxed distance of the cillary muscles is 10 feet, and they start working when we move objects closer, what happens if we move the object further away? The cillary muscles cannot “over-relax”, and therefore, the lens is forced to use the same shape for the 10 foot object and the 15 foot object. This lens shape which converges light rays perfectly for the 10 foot object does this to the object at 15 feet.

As you can see, the light converges at a point in front of the retina. The higher the severity of the myopia, or the further away the object being focused on is, the further forward this point will be. Whatever is viewed at a distance of greater than 10 feet will be blurry.

To connect the cillary muscles to our laws of dynamic muscle size, we must understand these few points. The human cillary muscles, in an emmetrope (person with normal vision), when completely relaxed, are conditioned to focus at 20 feet away. This is the resting accommodation. Anything further than 20 feet away will begin to lose detail since the cillary muscles cannot over-relax. They can contract however, and focus on anything under 20 feet. In a myope of 20/40 vision, the resting accommodation has been lowered to half of normal, (20/40=0.5), and therefore they can focus on something 10 feet away with clarity. Anything further than 10 feet away is going to start losing some detail. Moreover, we know that the 20/20 eye, when put under constant stress;  the cillary muscles have had to constantly accommodate for things closer  than 20 feet away,  will change shape along with the cillary muscles to minimize the amount of energy used to maintain this state of contraction. Therefore, the lens and cillary muscles shift their resting level to whatever distance was being looked at, ergo, we have a different shape of the eye.

I hope after that, you understand the basic principles of myopia that lasts for “6 hours”, but we know that myopia is not going to be magically cured if you look into the distance for 6 hours… We want to know what causes it (as in, why doesn’t it bounce back to normal like the bicep muscles), and what this “secret” is. I assure you…we’re nearly there. We will now advance to the causes of myopia…

It is simple to blame everything on “genetics” or “heredity”, much like the optical industry has. Such generalizations serve to create the image that myopia is immutable, and the frequency has and ever will be exactly the same, thereby forcing people to abandon notions of cures and keep buying glasses, but this part can wait. We have to understand what causes myopia first, and to understand that…we need to go back to our friend on the bus. By the way, I haven’t told you his name…and I don’t plan on it:)

Our friend is sitting on the bus, his eyes tired and his muscles fatigued. He reclines slightly and nods off to sleep. In his dreams, he recalls his younger years in elementary school, back when he didn’t wear glasses. He was sitting at his desk, reading a paper, his eyes inches away from the page in front of him. Every ten minutes or so he’d look up at the clock, and every time he looks up he realizes that his vision is getting slightly blurrier. Right before recess, his eyes are like a person with 20/30 vision. They have adapted slightly to the intensive reading of the paper. During his recess, he plays soccer with his friends, and upon coming back in, his vision is about 20/25, it has gotten better because his cillary muscles realize that they do not need to maintain this football shape of the eye. Mechanical forces put them back to their old shape. He reads a bit more, goes home, and watches TV at a distance of 9 feet away until bed time. His vision is about 20/32. He goes to sleep, and upon waking up, his vision is back to 20/20. It must be noted that while sleeping, the size changes of the cillary muscles are “reset”, therefore the spherical shape of the eyeball is restored, and the vision is normal in the morning. This resetting can only repair a particular amount however.

His dream now fast forwards a couple years; he is now in grade 5. He has become an avid book reader, and does all his homework diligently. Every night, he goes to sleep with his eyes kind of tired, his adjusted vision probably around 20/40. The first few mornings, sleep is able to completely reset whatever shape modifications have occurred during the day, but slowly and surely, the sleep starts to leave a little bit of a football shape. Over and over again, his vision is reset during sleep, but a tiny bit is left unrepaired. And though a couple days off of school would have fixed this, during the weekends, he is reading or playing video games, and therefore, his eyes change shape again, even on the weekend. After a couple months of this, the left over football shape is enough to be noticeable, even right in the morning. At school, he may be squinting to see the blackboard clearly, and may have difficulty seeing faces from a distance. The boy goes to see his mother, and tells her about the vision problems he’s been undergoing. The mother takes him to the optometrist, who tests the boy for myopia and finds that he has a myopic level of 20/30. Though the optometrist could have simply told the boy the he should look up from his papers every couple minutes for a few seconds, and that that would have, over a period of a couple weeks to a couple months, reversed his myopia, he instead gives him glasses. Now comes the secret that most people have been brainwashed to deny; glasses DO make your vision worse. Most people, upon telling them that you don’t want to wear your glasses, will ridicule you, telling you that you will be “straining” your eyes, whatever that means… But the thing is, you listen to them, and you’ve listened to them, and that’s the reason why, if you are myopic and have had your glasses and have worn them for over 5 years, you will not have a prescription of 20/30 or 20/40, but more like 20/80 or 20/100. Just so half of you don’t disregard me completely; if you don’t have myopia and are an avid reader or do a lot of close work,  I will explain your situation a bit later. Of course, I don’t want you to just take my word on the whole glasses thing, I’m going to explain why they’re the secret to myopia as simply as I can.

I would prefer to save the lesson in optics and light refraction for another time, since that is not of concern. I will go about explaining how glasses work in the simplest way possible, though it may still be complicated…the final sentence of this paragraph will summarize everything said here. Take a man with a prescription of 20/40. His glasses are perfectly correcting (I will explain more about this later). This means that if this man is looking at an object 20 feet away from him through his glasses, it will appear (to his optical mechanisms (muscles, lens, etc) to be 10 feet away from him. To be a little bit more clear, the glasses act in a way to preliminarily refract the light by an amount that will compensate for the lack of accommodation that the 20/40 eye has for an object at 20 feet away. Since the cillary muscles of a 20/40 person are unable to refract the light in such a way to converge it onto the retina for an object over 10 feet away, the glasses act as a second lens, producing a primary refraction. This just begs the question: so what!? Well I’ll tell you what…This is all good and nice for anything  20 feet or further away for a 20/40 myope. When the object is equal or greater than 20 feet away, the cillary muscles do not have to contract at all; the glasses do all the work; therefore, there can be no dynamic muscle shape changing, which is what we don’t want. The real problem comes when the object is closer than 20 feet away. In this case, the glasses cause the object to appear closer than 10 feet away. Now, the cillary muscles must contract the change the shape of the lens to create proper convergence at the retina! The glasses are now causing the focusing on an object at between 10 and 20 feet, which without wearing glasses would not cause the cillary muscles to contract, to cause the cillary muscles to contract. Obviously, we can see the problem here. We’ve moved everything closer to the eye to fix the problem, but from our previous knowledge, we have realized that things that are closer cause our cillary muscles to contract even more, changing the shape of the eye even more. Okay, so a year passes for the 20/40 man, and he realizes his 20/40 glasses aren’t correcting as well anymore; things at 20 feet are blurry now, even with the glasses on. What has happened is that his eye slowly became more and more football shaped because of the stress on the cillary muscles, and sleep wasn’t able to repair it completely. He doesn’t know this, however, and contents himself with a trip to the optometrist. The optometrist gives him a new prescription; 20/50, and he gets new glasses, shelling out 200 dollars on the frames and another 60 on the lenses. In summary, this is the secret: The vicious cycle of a new prescription every year, bringing everything closer to your eyes, stressing your cillary muscles, changing the shape of your eyes, making you more and more myopic.

I hope by now you’ve realized that since the eye is a dynamic system, it can be manipulated by human inventions such as the eyeglasses, the consequences of which the original inventor could not have foreseen. However, with human nature, we are quick to capitalize on anything that can provide infinite return. For any in doubt on the connection between prolonged near-work and myopia , one simple statistic is sufficient: Myopia in schoolchildren and educated individuals is much more common than in school dropouts. Furthermore, the Japanese have done a lot of research into the issue, and have concluded that in groups where academic achievement is encouraged, myopia frequency is higher. For those who believe genetics or heredity is the driving cause behind myopia, they are only partially right. Research has shown that the connections between families having myopia break apart when members of the family do not engage in close-work as often, though there is still a higher frequency within families that have many myopes than the national average. Therefore, it must be rationalized that the genetic component for myopia only modifies susceptibility to the condition, not its inheritance.

Now, I am not encouraging the dropping out of school, nor am I considering the changing of lifestyles away from close-work. I am merely proposing that we follow very simple guidelines when it comes to prolonged close-work. If we simply look up every couple minutes for around 3-5 seconds, I believe that should be sufficient to confuse the cillary muscles into remaining as they are. Getting the recommended amount of sleep is also necessary. The final solution is the use of reading glasses whenever you read. Reading glasses have the opposite effect of the glasses for distance vision, they bring everything further away, therefore, what may be 10 inches from your face will now seem to be 2 or 3 feet away. The effect of this is that the cillary muscles are now relaxed, which is good, of course. The reading glasses can become quite cumbersome, however, and cheap reading glasses will have imperfections in the shape of the lens that will lead to eyestrain.

It is quite obvious that the optometric community knows the secret of glasses and have been quick to spread disinformation such as claims that it is all caused by genetics. The other claim is that it is unpreventable. All the steps above will prevent myopia from occurring, unless you have very powerful genotypes that cause very quick adaptation of the cillary muscles to close-work. Otherwise, myopia is a very preventable state. It is not a disease, or an illness, it is simply a state. In order to accelerate progression of myopia, optometrists often give over-corrective lenses, which will bring everything even closer to your eyes, thereby causing more strain to the cillary muscles. This isn’t just a fairy tale. This is the biggest premeditated corporate scam since big tobacco.

The problem with myopia, however, is that curing it is next to impossible by natural means. LASIK, PRK, Orthokeratotomy and the like are all ways of curing myopia, but they are unperfected procedures that are relatively still in their infancy, especially Ortho-K. There is a story of an American Soldier who was very myopic. During his tour of duty in Vietnam, he fell into a jungle, and got lost for around six months. After he eventually found his way out, his vision was perfect. This will cure myopia for sure, for the complete abolition of close-work will reverse the eye’s shape slowly but surely. But this isn’t plausible for the average person who holds a job or goes to school and has a family to attend to. Therefore, we must shift the focus off ourselves, if we are myopic, and onto the next generation, who will need to be warned of the problems with close-work. Of course, we’ll be met with hostility or mockery from the whole optometry community, including its blindly following (pun intended) supporters, but we must ignore it all, and make sure the next generation is not duped into believing that glasses are inevitable.

I hope you enjoyed this article and were enlightened by it, and I hope you’ll take some kind of action, even if it’s just passing on the message. I also hope it was all understandable. Thank you for reading

Christopher

Christopher