A Battlefield of Bad Eyes

"If blind students can earn college degrees, surely we can make arrangements so that myopic children can see the blackboard without resorting to glasses. They can be allowed to sit in the front rows, the teacher can write larger, the blackboard can be better lighted." — Donald S. Rehm, The Myopia Myth, 1981, 2001.

In building out a science report scene for CONES, I researched some stats on eyeglasses. Though the numbers don't always add up and vary from source to source, the consensus is that most adults now wear glasses, and that the number of North Americans with myopia (nearsightedness) has just about doubled in the past 50 years. Most sources agree that the uptick in myopia is due to people spending more time indoors looking at screens, and that more "traditional" activities (i.e., hunting and farming) would be a way for people to prevent myopia.


What people disagree on is what to do to treat myopia. Modern optometry leans toward "correction" through prescription, and a lot the websites advocating for this are run by prescription lens companies and optometrists who do not mention vision therapy and lifestyle changes that could help strengthen the eyes. Meanwhile, more people are asking, "Do glasses make my eyes worse?" The optometry professionals at the top of a search results who say, "No," primarily defend glasses as a solution by citing age-related presbyopia, or farsightedness resulting from the harding of our lenses (the natural ones in our eyes just behind the cornea). But what about the myopia that more and more of us are experiencing earlier in life?

Donald S. Rehm, an engineer and founder of the Myopia Prevention Association, has an interesting treatise on how corrective lenses can make myopia worse. Rehm presents some good optical science and relates it to eye physiology to demonstrate how lenses typically prescribed for nearsighted people can do a lot of damage in attempting to correct a person's vision. While Rehm's view (and earlier, Dr. William H. Bates, who advocated for getting rid of glasses) is unpopular in mainstream optometry, it opens up many questions that many conventional eye doctors have long been silencing: Why has myopia been on the rise? And why do most people with myopia need to get stronger lenses every year?

My experience as a person with myopia is that optometry has been a battleground between these two camps. People like Rehm and Bates (who don't fully agree with each other), or vision therapists like Meir Schneider, are cast to the fringes for their outspokenness (and it doesn't help that most of these guys' websites look like they were designed by 8th graders in the mid-1990s). Many other functional optometrists share these dissenting views, but have learned to keep quiet about it in order to continue working. This is very upsetting to those of us with severe myopia, left as casualties on this battlefield, not knowing whom to turn to for support. This blog and the piece I'm making are a step toward finding that support.

"31 Eyes"

I have a confession to make: This is not the first blog I've made about vision. It is the second.

In 2010 I wrote a month-long blog called 31 Eyes (one for each of day of the month) that featured daily tips toward improving one's vision. See it here.

I based a lot of 31 Eyes' material on the work of natural vision therapists like William H. Bates and Meir Schneider. Today in rehearsal we looked at one of Schneider's "Yoga for the Eyes" videos. This one:


It's amazing to revisit this work and to remember how helpful it was in bringing relaxation to my eyes as well as improvements to my vision. 5 years after making 31 Eyes and 18 years after adopting Schneider's methods, I say watch this video, have a look at the blog, and try these exercises. We might also be doing some together during the show.

Seeing Song #1: That's Nash, Not Cash

In 2004 I went on a retreat co-led by Marc Grossman, a functional optometrist who also practices Chinese medicine. Everyone at the retreat had some sort of visual condition (mostly presbyopia) that they wanted to alleviate, and my own cone dystrophy was perhaps the most severe condition in the room, even though I was the youngest person there. I was also the only male, aside from the facilitators.

Over the course of the week we did eye exercises, some meditating and journaling, and practiced a daily yoga sequence designed to stimulate meridians associated with vision. At week's end everyone was eager to receive Dr. Grossman's herbal and dietary prescriptions tailored to our specific eye troubles. But the moment that brought the greatest elation was when he put on a CD and this song played:


I love Johnny Nash's original version because it gradually introduces dissonant elements that build tension in an otherwise "everything-is-just-hunky-dory" type song: An out-of-tune accordion kicks in on the second verse, a Moog synthesizer takes over the bridge, and lyrics about blue skies shift into foreboding minor keys because we know that life's not really gonna be all bright and sunshiny every day, right? But we can hope, just like a roomful of middle-aged ladies who smile and dance along at a yoga studio in the Berkshires, ready to drive back to Long Island, to their homes and their husbands, maybe to try on their miracle cures.

PS: I absolutely recommend taking a workshop with Marc, and I have lots to say about functional optometry, acupuncture, herbal medicine and yoga as methods for improving vision. If you're curious, leave me a comment below.

Blind Book #1: Girl in the Dark

Anna Lyndsey isn't blind, but she lives in the dark because of her acute photosensitive seborrhoeic dermatitis, an illness that makes all contact with light feel like a blowtorch on her skin. While most blind folks can walk out into the light, they just can't see much, Lyndsey could see were she able to exist in the light. Have a listen to this chapter, "Metaphor", in which she reviews a handful of audiobooks whose protagonists have something in common with her. She also reviews a couple of new age healers and offers a game:

Games to Play in the Dark 5: Scribe 

This is a game to play on your own, when talking books have palled, when you have no visitors in prospect, when boredom eats your brain. 

You will need a large bound notebook and a pencil. A bound notebook so that your pages are disciplined and do not become entangled. A pencil, because a pen could run out and in the dark you will not be able to tell. 

Pick up your pencil and open your notebook. 

Place the thumb of your non-writing hand on the page beneath the start of the first line. 

Your thumb will act as a marker, so that there will be space between each line and the next. 

Write. 

Write what? 

Write what you know. Isn't that what they say? What you know is the darkness. 

And as you begin to form words on the page, the darkness around you moves. It starts to gather, to circle, to form a vortex round the end of your pencil, and then — down the pencil's black centre it pours. 

It is unstoppable. It flows faster and faster, funneling down that slim conductive wand, erupting on to the page, staining its purity with straggling struggling words. 

And in your mind, a light goes on.

—Anna Lyndsey, Girl in the Dark

Listen (or read) here.

Tetrachromatics 101: A Rainbow of Misinformation

Capitalizing on the web's weird dress fetish the other day, an inaccurate Linkedin article about tetrachromacy (having 4 types of retinal cone cells instead of the usual 3) wormed its way off the internet and into 3 million people's heads. The article offered a bar of 39 web-safe colors (pictured above) and told readers that the number of colors they saw indicated the makeup of their cone cells. This article was so misleading, I refrain from even linking to it, but I will point you to this video that gives a fun 5-minute crash-course in cone science. I've also posted some reputable sources at the bottom of this post.

How (aside from spelling and grammatical errors) was said Linkedin article inaccurate? Let me count the ways:

1. The title statement, "25% of the people [sic] have a 4th cone"is false. Only the half of us with two X chromosomes (primarily women) are eligible to have four types of cone cells (RGB+1), and of these a possible 12% are tetrachromats, meaning that only 6% of "the people" (half of 12%) can have a 4th cone. Of these 6%, very few are functioning tetrachromats: that "+1" cone is akin to the low-functioning mutant cone in X-linked colorblindness (see #3 below).
2. An online rainbow will NOT tell you if you have a 4th cone. Because color monitors are trichromatic (RGB) like the cones in our eyes, they do not produce colors that trichromats cannot see.
3. The statement, "You are dichromats, like dogs," is not true for all people who have trouble differentiating color. In common X-linked color blindness, a third cone is present instead of the red or green cone, it's just low-functioning. Many color-impaired people have other retinal disorders, such as cone dystrophy or macular degeneration, which can limit perception of color. They are not dichromts.
4. Saying that colorblind people, "are likely to wear black, beige and blue," is baloney. Colorblind people often ask color-seeing friends to help them pick out and label clothes and advise them as to what matches with what. Or they just go through life wearing whatever.
5. Also false: "25% of the population is dichromat" and, "50% of the population is trichromat." Almost everyone (at least 94%) is trichromatic.
6. Saying that tetrachromats are "irritated by yellow" and therefore own no yellow clothes is a sham Just as with the "black, beige and blue" statement from #4, the author is picking colors that tend to be popular or unpopular and misleading readers into thinking that they are retinal mutants.
7. Finally, who in the world puts a winky-face with its tongue hanging out in the title of their article and expects it to be taken seriously? 'Nuff said.

Further reading:

• Good popular science article on the subject: Greenwood, Veronique. "The Humans with the Super Human Vision." Discover. August, 2012.
• A little more academic: Katta, Samata. "Ask a Neuroscientist: Human Tetrachromacy." Neuroblog. Stanford University. December, 2013.
• Again, this short video from Blue Man Group gives a quick introduction to how rods and cones work.
• And this podcast piece about tetrachromacy is as excellent as it is entertaining:

Believing is Seeing: Blind Film #7

The film's title asks, What the Bleep Do We Know? One thing I know is that the phrase, "A wonderful story that I believe is true," might not be the strongest line to open a scientific statement. Many scholars and scientists have dismissed this movie as such tosh peddled by charlatans, but in light of mirages and other illusions that we experience on the sea, why not this phenomenon? Provide your anwers in the comments. I'll give mine in a future post.