Dear Prevention minded friends,

Subject:  A scientist who has been successful with
     plus-prevention.

Re:  Support for Steve Leung OD to offer the a DISCUSSION
of this preventive method to parents and chidren
before that FIRST minus lens is "prescribed."

    "The important thing is to not stop questioning.  Curiosity
has its own reason for existing".

                    Albert Einstein

    It is always good to listen to scientists and people who have
been successful in vision-clearing work.

    This is something to consider before your child is put into a
strong minus lens.

    The letter was written to support Steve Leung's offer to help
parents and children understand the necessity of using the plus
for prevention -- before the minus lens is used.

www.chinamyopia.org

    As always, enjoy our pleasant conversations to support for
"prevention advocacy."

         __________________________________

Dear Mr Alfred Hon H.I

    I would like to pass on to you a letter to the Chinese people
in the hope that greater understanding will lead to a better life
for us all.  This has been written in the support of a mutual
friend, Steve Leung, Optometrist, in order to support his work in
the prevention of myopia.

    I am a senior scientists, astrophysicist and nuclear
physicist at Los Alamos National Laboratory and a member of the
National Academy of Sciences of the USA.  For all of my scientific
career I have been dedicated to understanding the cause of natural
phenomena.  From the age of 13 years, now 66 years ago, I
recognized that the standard response to myopia was perhaps
misguided.  Instead I used positive lens glasses to correct, or
alter my focal environment, namely one of reading nearly all the
time, a near-point focal environment.  (A positive lens "corrects"
a near-point focal environment by altering the light rays to be
more parallel from the near-point object, as if the print were
made more distant.) Being young and therefore developmentally
plastic, my eyes and their focal properties immediately responded.
Within just a few weeks, the clarity or focus of distant objects
had been nearly restored.  (This plasticity of development or
focal adaptation of the eye ball length decreases with age.) This
was just as I expected from scientific arguments.  I had to
maintain the use of a positive lens for reading thereafter.  This
was a small price to pay for perfect distance vision for all my
life.

    I have continued an effort to bring this awareness of the
focal adaptation of the natural eye to the public, but
unfortunately the ease and immediate response of the standard
treatment of using a negative lens to reverse the myopic
adaptation to a near point environment is so immediate and so
rewarding to the myope (the myopic young person) that I and a few
associates have not been successful.  This is regardless of the
decades after the ground breaking scientific research by Dr.
Francis Young, and Dr.    Howard Howland and others who demonstrated
the unique correspondence between a near point environment and the
development of myopia.

    I have worked scientifically with Prof.  Joshua Wallman of
City College New York where his research on the response of the
natural eye to focal and neurological environments is leading the
fundamental research on this topic in the US.  The animal model
used is the recovery function of the deprivation induced myopia of
the chicken eye.  Here myopia and recovery can be altered by up to
10 diopters in a few weeks.  (One diopter is the focal length of a
lens of a meter.) This extreme animal model allows many factors of
influence to be investigated in a short time.  Although the
complexity of the response of the eye is extraordinary and a
detailed understanding of the mechanisms of adaptation still
eludes all in the scientific field, nevertheless there is no
experiment, no anecdotal example that contradicts, and no doubt in
my mind that myopia in all animals, including humans, is induced
in response to a near point focal environment.

    In view of this research and countless personal successful
examples, the growing number of myopic individuals in the world is
deplorable, when such a simple remedy is available to the public.

    As a dedicated optometrist you have taken a lead in
attempting to bring this knowledge and benefit to your patients.
For you to be sued or persecuted within your own professional
societies is wrong.  You should be lauded and encouraged instead.

    I am reminded of the first health professionals who spoke out
about the health problems that smoking brings to a society.
Theirs was a difficult task, but now thirty years later, smoking
in the US has declined to a negligible fraction of society.  If we
can give up smoking, we can also be weaned from the negative lens.
(A negative lens brings instant gratification of sharp focus to
the young myopic person, but greatly potentiates further myopic
progression.)

    I do hope and recommend that you are strongly supported by
your colleagues of dedicated optometrists and that you all may
bring to your profession the hope and implementation of myopia
prevention for human kind.

Sincerely yours,

Stirling A.  Colgate,

(Senior Fellow Los Alamos National Laboratory and
Member of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA.)