It was just about a year ago that I had my final consultation with MP Snead in relation to what I have continued to experience as something close to miraculous: for the first time in my life, I have 20-20 vision, and for the first time since I was five years old, do not need corrective lenses except for reading quite small print in quite dark rooms. By coincidence, Peter and I went out to lunch in Cambridge today to the same restaurant where we’d gone a year ago to celebrate my new vision. I’m still dancing.
Today seems a particularly appropriate day to write about a website that wrote to this blog asking if I would be willing to write a unbiased review of the Improve-Vision glasses and exercise package for which I would be paid. “Unbiased” and “paid” come close to being contradictory terms in my experience, and I have remained sufficiently dubious about the proposition not to inquire about what payment is involved. However, I did study the website along with the manual that accompanies their Exercise Vision Kit which was sent to me by e-mail.
I will confess that I am intrigued and think this approach to improving vision could be seriously effective. When I was growing up, doing eye exercises to improve vision had about as much credibility as doing “brain exercises” to improve intelligence. I more or less accepted the received wisdom that both were pretty much fixed at birth and were not generally influenced by environmental factors.
Recently, however, I have become convinced that the environment can make a huge difference. Near-sightedness is increasing at an alarming pace in developed societies where children and adults do much more close work than we have done in more traditional societies. Books, computers, and televisions are the main contributors to this change. Research is showing that there is a close connection as well between various vision deficiencies and reading, writing, and spatial problems such as dyslexia, confusing left and right, developing a sense of direction, depth perception, and many sports activities, particularly where catching and throwing something -like a ball – is involved.
My first suspicion that exercise could be one of the significant ways to improve vision came from my own experience with cataracts. As the cataract blurred the vision in my stronger eye more quickly than in my traditional “lazy” eye, my lazy eye began to take over more and more. My two eyes even began to coordinate and give me bi-focal depth perception I’d never experienced before. It is an experience not dissimilar from the results achieved when children with a lazy eye wear a patch over the strong eye to force the lazy eye to work.
I cannot in all honesty tell you whether I think the exercises that one does using the Improve Vision Kit work. I’ve seen no research into these particular exercises and I am not a qualified ophthalmologist. My original plan was to test out the glasses and exercises myself and perhaps on one of my many relatives among whom there is a wide-range of vision difficulties. The glasses and software are currently on offer (see http://www.improve-vision.com/order_improve_vision.html ), but I have not purchased them. So I cannot offer an informed opinion.
I would be extremely interested in hearing from anyone who has tried out the Improve Vision Kit, or anything like it, though. The website says it’s better than laser treatment.
Given the potential disaster that could result from laser treatment gone wrong, eye exercises come close to sounding like another miracle. On the other hand, it might be a rather over-priced scam. I have my fears.
