Was Dr Bates entirely right? Anyone better than him?

[Aureus]

We the People of the United States...Doh, let's try again.

We the people who work to better our eyesight have a deep respect and gratitude to the one who was the first ophthalmologist to say VISION CAN IMPROVE by natural means. His name is Dr Bates. And not only that he said so but he wrote a lot to show people how to overcome visual problems and to regain their perfect eyesight or to significantly decrease high degree of myopia, hyperopia, presbyopia, astigmatism and other errors and states which cause our vision to be blurred and our eyes weak and degrading.

A hundred years after the peak of his work the mainstream in his profession is still on the opposite track.
In the meantime, we got a bunch of the vision improvement teachers who follow him entirely but we also got people who claim they edited some of his principles or pushed them forward both in theory and practice.

This leads us to interesting questions:

1. Was Dr Bates entirely right?

2. What is the biggest flaw or error (if any exist) in his theory and practice? Is there anything that Dr Bates wasn't aware of to sufficient extent?

3. Is there anyone who developed or edited his teaching and made it even better? In what particular area?

4. Is there anyone who didn't base their work on Dr Bates but created even better and more functional system for natural vision improvement?

[David]

It's good to try to update his method with modern knowledge if possible. Lots of people who promote his method have added their own things that aren't really about the core principles of seeing but are interesting ways of approaching health. Tom Quackenbush and several other people.

But even as far as the specific topics Bates wrote about, I think there is room for modern updating.

Meditation I think is a good adjunct, but the word meditation wasn't even in the Western vocabulary at the time. So the idea of visualizing to improve vision... I'm still amazed that he ever figured that out, with almost no resources on the matter to even suggest such a thing. He was one of those people like Einstein who was observant and could pull ideas out of nowhere, without prejudice, that describe how reality works.

But I think with visualization if you really start to study it and leave no stone unturned you start to go down the rabbit hole, and the research never ends. Are we changing our brain or changing ourselves on a soul level? Even with expensive equipment we are able to track almost nothing about what's going on. Sure, brainwaves, areas of the brain lighting up, but that's just scratching the surface.

[Aureus]

So the idea of visualizing to improve vision...

Are we changing our brain or changing ourselves on a soul level?

I feel visualization works pretty much in my case.

And what's the best - it seems it works no matter what error you have in your eyes. You can have plus or minus sphere or cylinders - yet it functions. My opinion what stands behind is that it functions like a direct order from the brain to the eyes: I see a sharp "P", so let's customize the aparatus to that. At that moment you don't see a sharp "P" - in a way you just pretend you see it. You IMAGINE - to use this word - you see it eyes closed or open, or both.

The trick is you don't do this in a hard, concentrated manner. You don't have to "concentrate". You mustn't concentrate actually. This is a bit counterintuitive, as some other parts of Dr Bates' teaching.

"To demonstrate that the attempt to concentrate spoils the memory, or imagination, and the vision.
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MOST patients who come to me for the cure of imperfect sight think that they have to "concentrate" in order to improve their vision. When told that they should see nothing but black when their eyes are closed and covered, they think that they can arrive at this state by "concentrating" on the black. When they look at a line of letters and see it imperfectly and all alike, they think it is because they cannot "concentrate." If they see better after closing their eyes or palming, they think it is because these things have helped them to "concentrate."

It is very hard to get these ideas out of their heads, even though, after "concentrating for all they are worth," as they express it, they invariably find that their sight is worse instead of better.

By concentration they seem to mean the ability to do, see, or remember, one thing at a time, for as long a time as they want to, and to stop doing, seeing and remembering everything else; and they are quite convinced that this can be accomplished by effort. As these ideas are almost entirely erroneous, it is not strange that their sight should fail to improve under their influence."

(Dr Bates's article in Better Eyesight, July 1921)

P.S. A PARALLEL WITH VISUALISATION:

Earlier it was a big mess with printing the things. You see one colour at the screen and the printer prints a different tone of it. Eventually someone got the idea: Let's scan a printed page and compare it bit by bit with the original one in the computer. So they did it and wrote a program for it. The program was then able to customize the printer so that its output matches the original.