The Bates Method - Eyerobics

Contemporary vision related treatments are purely mechanical in nature, either centered around corrective lenses or surgical methods ('Lasix' iirc), everyone probably knows what physiotherapy is, but adapting the method for any part of a living organism apparently seems unreasonable to virtually everyone, otherwise the following would be readily known.

The Bates Method is exactly that, train your eyes, very much like you'd train a muscle, it may take a while but it works, if applied with patience, while traditional medicine is making a grave mistake in its misguided attempt to instantly 'cure' vision deficiencies by use of corrective lenses.

Consider the muscular analogy, instead of carefully training an injured limb back to level, you get a bionic exoskeleton, performing all desired movements for you... no doubt that degeneration would continue unabated. the moral of the story is the use of undercorrected glasses used as a temporary aid, if any. step by step introduction (click)


the following link is old (mid 90s) and you will need to browse the website on your own,

Source#2

This traditional viewpoint holds that when your eyeball is defective, you need a "corrective" device to compensate for the imperfection. One would think that "corrective" tools like lenses would eventually be removed once the therapy is complete.

"On the contrary, lens prescriptions typically became stronger! This leads to a greater and greater dependency, as insidious in its own was as a dependency upon drugs, sugar, or alcohol."

Kaplan said he was a victim of that thinking during his training as an eye doctor and carried this knowledge into his practice.

"After working with thousands of patients as an optometrist in Africa and the United States, on day I realized that I was actually contributing to their loss of visual fitness."

The wisdom of Kaplan's advice is evident. If your glasses are at full-strengh, your visual system becomes lazy and the effort is done by the mechanical device, the glasses instead. Would you continue to wear crutches after your broken leg had healed?.

Kaplan found a compromise which gives you reasonably good acuity while exercising your visual system and reducing the gap. Glasses permitting you to see at 20/40 or at 83.6% are the optimal, Kaplan writes. "Thus it seems that the brain ‘prefers’ the 83.6 vision fitness prescription. The brain and the eyes then have a chance to be exercised, just like the older muscles of the body that respond well to being exercised."...

Contact lenses are to be avoided. They are a foreign body on the eyes and restrict the flow of oxygen. All types are dangerous.

sounds plausible doesn't it? on to dietary advices (and my personal comments on them which you are not going to like very much, probably)

Dr. Kaplan urges us to eliminate meat and dairy products. He gives many examples of people progressing to better vision whose progress was immediately and obviously interrupted by one time eating of meat, eggs or milk. Beans, tofu, soya milk, and other non processed foods, uncooked by preference, are his recommended diet for vision improvement. At least 20 minutes of exercise, preferably aerobic. Use a trampoline and move your head around while jumping. Spend at least 20 minutes outdoors.

so far so good, you'll probably consider this the usual vegetarian drivel, so let me interject a little tidbit

Since the pioneering work of New York opthamologist, Dr. William Bates at the turn of the century it has become evident that you can improve your vision by your own efforts. Dr. Bates noted that the principal cause of visual defects was stress.

Now, let me try to clue you in: they don't warn against foodstuff high in protein, and explicitly recommend soy products, so the question arises what meat, eggs and milk (dead giveaway, imho) have got in common? Their animal origin, perhaps?

Lunacy or not, please put two and two together and imagine that stress can be 'inherited' by ingestion and consider what the average meatpacking factory or looks like and how animals are treated in general....


PS: i've been using that knowledge for ages, although i lacked access to explicit techniques, it can be done with all senses, but you shouldn't expect miracles, (of course) although you can improve your tolerance towards cold showers and, slightly related, pain.

[edit on 7-5-2006 by Long Lance]

Let's put two and two together please. i don't cite sources, but bear with me pls.

Under natural conditions, sunlight's spectrum combined with atmospheric properties results in depth perceptions through color or hue, to be exact, (blueish --> farther away) lamps, espectially neon lamps have a narrow spectrum biased towards red.... giving wrong distance data all the time.

this effect may affect different people with varying severity, but it's there, even incandescent lamps are not quite satisfactory in this regard. now guess how the optometrist determines your acuity?

hint: it doesn't involve sunlight. western paradigm has it that detrimental effects on vision are readily available (reading, bad lighting, etc...) but postiive infulence is regarded as impossible, go figure. one thing is certain, if you're into prescription, you won't get out of it, unless you disobey and take your fate into your won hands.