Why haven’t you heard of this method of vision improvement before?
Well, there are a lot of books out there, a bunch of them in print right now. Some recent ones I haven’t even read. Check out my Recommended Books page for some of the ones I’ve read and liked. There are some other ones I’ve read but aren’t listed.
ASIDE – On that page it’s Amazon links. I get a small % of each sale, usually a few cents or a dollar, hardly enough to bother with. But I’ve modified the list to reflect the most popular books that people actually buy. I don’t know, maybe I should just list all of them? But anyway these are the books that have been proven to sell, so people actually will read them, so maybe it works out best that way all around. Maybe those are the best books, even though I like a few other books too that nobody will buy?
Then there are a whole bunch more that are out of print, starting a hundred years ago with Perfect Sight Without Glasses. But none of these have been at the top of the best sellers lists, so you don’t often casually come by them as you’re browsing.
Then there are a lot of websites out there now, new ones popping up all the time… Visions of Joy has a links page with tons of links to websites, mostly current, by people who teach material based on the Bates method, behavioral optometrists, and other vision and health related websites, so it’s a good list. The Association of Vision Educators and Bates Method International also maintain directories of vision improvement teachers.
If you just do a Google search, you’ll come across packages sold by internet marketers that aren’t necessarily very good. They may have gathered together material and spruced it up nice, but they don’t always have any experience with the methods and are not actually interested in it themselves. So you can easily find things that sort of seem like the Bates method, or a combination of the Bates method and other things, but these methods aren’t effective unless they’re done with the right approach. It’s a subtle process that sometimes requires the help of an experienced teacher.
Some vision improvement teachers teach one-on-one private sessions, classes and workshops, and some travel around quite a bit.
There’s a conference that they do every year or two, the International Holistic Vision Conference. The next one is 2017 in Scotland. I went to a similar one, the North American Conference on Vision Improvement, and it was a nice experience. There were lots of interesting people there to connect with. And of course all the speakers and workshop organizers had a different approach to vision improvement, based on their background, experience and style, such as medical doctors, psychiatrists, behavioral optometrists, practitioners of EFT and other holistic health approaches, etc.
Books are the same way. They’re different, not just repeats of each other. You can gain something from each one, as long as it’s one of the good books.
And you might be thinking, Why didn’t my eye doctor tell me about this?
The basic answer is they weren’t taught about this. This isn’t the approach they were taught.
Optometrists were taught how to prescribe glasses, and a lot of useful stuff about optics and diseases of the eye. But mainly they prescribe glasses, because that’s the service they provide that people want.
If you look at the doctors who teach the classes in optometry school or medical school, this type of stuff isn’t really brought up but maybe one day during the “don’t believe any of this fringe stuff” lecture, and the budding doctors are warned against it.
And that comes down to their world view and how they see the human body and what it’s capable of.
Science is supposed to be an ever-changing process where it’s understood that everything is a theory with varying levels of confidence, new theories are fully explored with curiosity and objectivity, and new theories replace old ones when they fit the facts better. But there are problems with this in practice. Doctors, professors, and textbook authors have a hard time admitting that what they taught last year was wrong and that a new modified theory is better. This would be easier to do if they admitted all along that these were the best ideas out there, as far as they knew, and that none of this should be taken as the absolute truth. But they are in the habit of presenting their material as established fact, and there’s no way to save face when it turns out not to be incomplete. So they don’t operate in the spirit of true science, and you miss out.
So that’s how the medical establishment in general operates. And they do a lot of good. Emergency rooms, for example, save tons of lives daily. They are really good at emergency medicine, whether it’s stopping bleeding, setting broken bones, restarting your heart, etc. Highly skilled stuff.
When it comes to long-term care, they don’t do so well. People start to break up the habits of bad vision and notice fluctuations, but eye doctors are trained in a worldview where things can be measured reliably and vision doesn’t change in the short term.
So another question is, why are there these alternative approaches to vision health? We already have conventional medicine and eye care, right?
Well, people have gotten bad results. Look at the epidemic of myopia. It’s gotten worse and worse over the decades, and they can’t explain it sufficiently, and they certainly aren’t helping turn it around. And people find that the methods I promote do turn around their vision and address the real problems.
So you might not have heard about this stuff before, but now you have!
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I founded iblindness.org in 2002 as I began reading books on the Bates Method and became interested in vision improvement. I believe that everyone who is motivated can identify the roots of their vision problems and apply behavioral changes to solve them.