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A Holistic View of Nearsightedness

An emergency room makes the difference between a person living and dying. It’s worth doing whatever is possible to get a patient breathing again immediately. If he comes in with a broken arm, serious intervention to is needed to set the bone or even do surgery on the surrounding area.

But once the bone is set and he walks out with a cast, it’s understood that the cast is temporary. Likewise, once a patient can breathe on his own, the ventilator is taken away.

What happens with glasses? Your eye doctor gives you your first pair of glasses for myopia at a young age, and what does he tell you? That they’re a temporary measure and that you can remove them in a month? Nope. If he’s being forthcoming, he tells you to wear them all the time, for the rest of your life, or your vision will get worse. That’s what he was taught and what he believes is the only answer.

Then what happens?

You wear them all the time, and your vision gets worse anyway.

Businesses in another industry, or giving a therapy not endorsed by the medical establishment, selling a product that has this kind of long-term effect would face class action lawsuits up the wazoo.

Holistic medicine takes the approach that you are already capable of recovering from nearsightedness, and you only need to be shown the way.

Holistic medicine means you are taking responsibility for your own health, recognizing that you do have the power to change your vision by changing how you operate. The ability to reverse myopia is already within you. I know this. Drugs and surgery are not necessary for this and will not solve all your problems. They treat one symptom only, that symptom being the eyes not focusing for the distance, which is what we call myopia. There are other symptoms of this condition that the conventional approach does not address. As a result, you have to get stronger glasses next time, or you develop other eye or vision problems that people with good vision rarely have but people with myopia get all the time.

Nearsightedness is funny. Technically it doesn’t exist, not the way you think it does.

Imagine someone stands in front of you and throws punches at your face, you might dodge at first, then put your hands up, then even as you realize he might not be intending to hit you at all, but just make you react, you still flinch. Could you stop flinching? Of course. But you keep doing it. Maybe you even feel like it’s impossible not to react that way. But the fact is, if you didn’t feel like you were being attacked, there’s nothing in your physiological makeup that prevents you from standing there calmly.

Your vision is exactly like that. If you’re nearsighted, believe it or not, there are times your eyes focus for the distance on their own, no big deal at all. You probably don’t consciously realize it.

This illustrates the potential of your vision. It’s just waiting for you to use it right.

Taking the conventional approach, when you try to chase down and isolate a specific symptom, like blurry distance vision, you get sidetracked. You treat the symptom that’s bothering you the most right now.

Conventional medicine gives you the solutions of glasses, contacts and LASIK surgery. It treats the symptoms. It runs with the idea that parts of the body can be separated into their component parts and each part treated in isolation, the way an auto mechanic works on a car, and that the smaller you can divide parts up into the more targeted and effective the treatment.

So you take that approach, and then you suffer from eyestrain, or with high myopia you experience a retinal detachment, which is very serious. So you try to treat those additional symptoms. It doesn’t end. The underlying true causes become more entrenched.

Holistic means recognizing that the parts of your body and mind work interdependently, as a whole, and that it isn’t always obvious what is really causing a certain problem.

The visual system is complex. There is a way it is designed to work, and it relies on the contribution of many processes to provide the final result of clear vision and efficient perception. When your eyes become tense, less mobile, the delicately balanced system is thrown out of whack. Your peripheral vision isn’t used right. Your depth perception suffers. Psychologically you become less able to optimally process the parts and the whole when it comes to abstract concepts, and that leads to further patterns that become solidified as habits in themselves.

And the key word here is pattern. We have identified the patterns of myopia in the way we use our eyes to perceive what’s in front of us and what’s around us. These patterns can be traced through us.

Some patterns might be just the way you are. They are what express your uniqueness. But when your patterns lead to myopia, you have gone too far out of balance. For your system to function right and not create this chronic blurry vision, you need to restore the balance that works better for you personally. Aggression and passivity. Activity and relaxation. A wide view and a narrow focus. Being comfortable in bright light and sensing details in darkness.

Regardless of how your pattern of myopia started, many of the common aspects of myopia probably are relevant to you. If it wasn’t what triggered your myopia to begin with, or even what was a risk factor for it, eventually some common aspects become part of your pattern anyway. It has to do with how these patterns begin to pervade through everything you do.

The beautiful thing is you can address each of those aspects, guiding them each into more efficient operation. It does matter what the root cause originally was, but it’s possible that that isn’t the main cause feeding your condition anymore and your condition has gotten worse or at least been maintained because of other factors. So it’s nice if, like in sci-fi movies, you can kill the Queen and all the other mutant bugs instantly die, but we’re a little more complex than that. Our remaining habits tend to hang on until we go through and loosen them in what ever order we can. Sometimes when you properly address one aspect, you uncover another aspect that underlies it, and you wouldn’t have found it otherwise. It’s interesting how it happens.

That’s why I favor holistic medicine whenever possible. The body knows what it’s doing, but it also follows your instructions. If you can believe you have the capability within you to see clearly, you can catch yourself in your bad habits, change your instructions, and change what happens.

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David

Author: David

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.

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Ismat

Very much true David. You explained it brilliantly. It is only that I started to believe that EYE DOCTORS and and EYE CARE specialists deeply know that what they are doing is useless and can be even harmful but it is an industry stream that they need to go with it

Mahmoud

Hey David I was really just curious have you had any issues with your vision?