Statement by Antonio,

[She cleared to -1/2 diopter -- which would be about 20/40.  She
could probably pass the standard DMV-Snellen test.]

Remembrances of a Myopia Past

    When I was a child, I understood as a child. I did not know that
when people are under stress they "zero in" at near, stop looking far,
and stop processing peripheral light.4 I figured out, though, that it
was much easier to read and cast my eyes down than to deal with the
hallways full of teenagers in my large junior high.

    I noticed in eighth grade, when I sat in the middle of the
auditorium that the people on the stage were blurry. I remembered that
the year before they had been clear from the back of the auditorium
where the seventh graders sat. I could still see the chalkboard but I
failed the school screening. My first glasses were -1.25 DS, OU and
with them I was given the power to see the veins on the leaves of the
trees at astounding distances. Was this the good vision I had lost?
After that I sat in the exam chair every year and demanded telescopic
sight. I did not have words for the extra stress those glasses put on
my accommodative system. I just took them off to read.

    I did not know how to react to that panicky feeling brought on by
the loss of clear sight. The inevitability of visual deterioration was
the worst of it, with no way to stop the inexorable process of eyeballs
growing longer and longer, I thought. I strained harder to see in the
same way one might focus in dim light on tiny print at near. Soon I
needed the glasses for the chalkboard as well as the auditorium. There
was no one to tap my occipital bone and tell me to "see farther back in
the head," to "relax and look softly," and to "hang on to the
periphery."

    I felt I was an oddity, a genetic mistake, totally unlike all of
my friends. Most people in those days had clear sight.5 Now we don't,
but our contact lens technologies and fashion frames have lulled us
into thinking myopia, rampantly increasing as it is, is not such a
loss. At age 12 in the fifties, though, it was socially and
aesthetically catastrophic to become a myope. I was known as the
"blonde bombshell" in junior high, but blondes were no longer
bombshells in girls' glasses with little rhinestones at the corners.
Later, when frames were small black cat eyes, good looks were still
elusive. With a prior self-image of beauty, I was suddenly caged in
ugliness. I wore them only in class. The rest of the time I moved in a
fog of vanity and became somewhat introverted. I stopped looking far. I
felt my personality change behind my very eyes. My mother wondered what
had happened to her "outgoing" daughter.

    I was athletic and had won a letter the year before I became
nearsighted. It was much harder to catch a ball with my glasses on.
Things were smaller and closer than they were without my glasses, and I
was in a different place. Behind my frames, I was no longer in the
world, but looking into it, instead. There was fear of breaking glasses
then, too. They didn't have prescriptions in plastic then and the only
contacts available to athletes were large, painful scleral lenses. Our
babysitter wore them and my emmetropic mother looked at her coming up
the walk, goggle-eyed, and said, "Poor Susan."

    My father was sorry that it was his "dominant" myopic genes that
had made us so blind. He gave me a book by oculist Dr. William Bates on
"better eyesight without glasses."6 At 13 or 14, I faithfully did the
exercises for three months, hoping to eliminate my then -2.50 DS with
cylinder myopic correction all at once. I surprised my ophthalmologist
that year because I did not get worse. He had predicted progression to
age 16.7 In fact, I never did get worse until a whiplash injury at 22
put me over the -3.00 DS mark,8 and during my second pregnancy an
appointment with an ophthalmologist unaware of hormones put me over the
-4.00 DS mark at age 29.

    Perhaps I even got better after "doing Bates," but it was not part
of my doctor's model of vision to take minus away from a myope. I would
"grow into it all soon enough," I heard him tell my mother. If
perchance I was already full grown, these would give me "extra help"
when I learned to drive. Or so we thought.

    I did not know that depth perception is affected by minus or that
when one has to over accommodate, convergence is pulled in more or
recalibrated. I just knew that space was so different in glasses that I
wasn't sure where things were any more. Once the driving instructor
used his brake when I was certain we could turn without hitting those
pedestrians.

    I did not suspect that the higher the lens power, the more the
periphery is warped by the lens, because light is focused for the
benefit of foveal acuity at the expense of ambient vision. Nor did I
understand that the more the periphery is warped, the harder it is to
see the center clearly because you cannot judge how far it is without
accurate peripheral cues. All I knew was that I didn't feel safe
driving. I could not see anything out of the sides of my eyes and had
to whip my head back and forth and back forth and was in great danger
of losing sight of the middle of the road. The driving instructor told
me I had to keep my eyes straight ahead and not look to the side or I
would drive off in the direction I was looking. I tried to do that, but
it scared me so much I didn't take my test until I was 20.

    I thought glasses gave me good vision, though, because I could see
the veins on the leaves of the faraway trees. I did not know that when
you're certain of what you see and where it is, that is good vision.
All I knew was that I didn't know what was there for sure without my
glasses, and with my glasses I wasn't sure where the what was. But I
was a child.

    When I was 21, my husband delighted me on our honeymoon by saying
I was beautiful in glasses and, since I could not see him clearly
across the table without them, he would be honored if I would wear them
all the time. He was worrying about the risks of my hard (the old PMMA
type) contact lenses because they frequently slid off my corneas when
he was kissing me and had to be retrieved from somewhere awfully close
to my brain. I was glad to get rid of them because I couldn't read in
them any more easily than I could read in my glasses. By then there was
no longer any possibility of not wearing something-except for reading.

    While I never read in glasses, I took notes in them. I sat through
high school and college and graduate school in them. No one ever
suggested a bifocal in class or plus spectacles over the contacts to
read. I told two contact lens specialists in two cities that I couldn't
read through my contact lenses. They both frowned and said "You should
be able to read through them," and that was that when I was a child.

    When I was 31, I was cyclopleged because another ophthalmologist
thought my case-hardened coke bottle lenses were too strong. He gave me
a -3.87 DS and a -3.37 DS, which I wore until I learned to reduce my
myopia. I had to keep them by my bedside table, but I still took them
off to read.

I believe her vision cleared. I've seen other myopes clear that much over 7
years. I believe there is more to it than pseudomyopia.

I just don't believe you can promise people your therapy will do that.

-MT

If I understand Mike correctly, he disagrees with the hypothesis that
tonic accommodation is the stimulus to axial change.  Please read the
header and refrain from getting off-topic.

With respect to the article about the woman who lost 4 diopters of
myopia is: so what?  If most myopes responded to that type of therapy,
one could actually publish something other than an interesting case
study on the internet.

What I did notice is that as her myopia decreased, so did her
prescription.

DrG

I was taught the four component stimuli are

tonic accommodation - resting component
accommodation based on blur - the biggest component, reflex focusing
convergence accommodation - accommodation due to shared innervation with
convergence
accommodation due to awareness of near - as in instrument myopia

That's what shows up when it's measured.

-MT