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.

Blind Film #10: They Live

The promise of glasses, as a way to see what's right in front of our faces, has never been more clear than Roddy Piper's revelation in the 1988 cult classic, They Live:

Rods & Canes

It's confirmed: the solo piece called CONES will debut in June, and we'll show a piece of that piece April 6+7 at the Rotunda in West Philly. More about that soon.

Much of this blog has been dramaturgy for this performance, and as we segue into more writing and rehearsing for CONES, these blog posts will be less frequent.

I'm really psyched to have some professional eyeball people on board. One of them is a fellow theatre artist who works with people who are losing their vision. The other day we met and talked about how there isn't much of "a blind community"—unlike deaf folks who have their own language and culture, blind and low vision folks don't necessarily hang out together. Why would we? The blind leading the blind might not be the best way to cross the street, and until self-driving cars hit the market, we're not apt to drive each other to Home Depot to stock up on power tools.

She also talked about how the bulk of the people that she trains to use white canes are not "fully blind" but have some vision. Popular perception of a person using a cane is that they are completely blind, but more common are folks just using the cane to tell others, "I can't see so well." The misconception of cane-wielders being completely in the dark vs. non-cane users being fully sighted, essentially invisibilizes the legally blind majority: folks who use canes and can see, as well as folks who don't use canes even though they sometimes can't see.

CONES and this blog are the beginnings of that conversation about this majority, a unconnected populace of real-life Mr. Magoos, searching for each other, not in the dark, but in the fog. That's what I'm talking about.

The Evolution of Devolution