My father-in-law is a bibliophile. He has a tonne of books on health and fitness, religion, different cultures, homeopathy, Bach flowers and the list goes on. After my marriage, I came across all this bundle of knowledge and read a few of them. One of them which attracted me the first was Seeing without glasses by Dr. Robert Michael Kaplan. The reason of my interest in this book was, I have worn glasses for 12-13 years, from the age of around 10 to 22 and then I had to go for LASIK surgery to get rid of them. After LASIK, I don’t have to wear glasses, but my vision is not 100% clear. Some things from far are still out of my sight. The title of the book also included – Improving your vision naturally. So I started reading the book having a thought in my mind that I may get some tips to take care of my eyes and improve my vision.
There are many exercises and tips for the eye care because of which I refer it to everyone, but few of them were shocking to me, following which would have actually removed my glasses and might save me from the surgery. I wished I knew them before.
Due to education stress and high exposure to screens, children these days face a lot of eye problems and a famous one of them is short sightedness, which I suffered too at a very tender age. When we go to doctor/Optometrist with this eye problem, he prescribes us lenses of suitable power to clarify our blurry vision and that truly makes sense – if the world is blurry with naked eyes, see it clearly through the lenses, but is this the right prescription?
Wearing glasses are no easy, because,
- You have to carry it everywhere with you.
- It can break and you have to get a new pair which is usually expensive.
- Sometimes, wearing it for long causes a headache.
- You can’t go for sports like swimming with your glasses on.
Tired of all these problems, patients asked Dr. Robert Michael Kaplan, writer of the book Seeing without glasses, if they can improve their eye sight naturally. The doctor experimented reducing the power of patients’ lens prescriptions and found that the optimum vision fitness level seemed to be around 83.6 percent. That means, if you can see one-inch letter at a distance of 20 feet, an Optometrist will give your rating 100% or 20/20. But you can see the letter designed for 40 feet at 20 feet, the rating will be 83.6% or 20/40. Most eye doctors prescribe the lenses which provide 100% or 20/20 vision, which Dr. Kalpan said is far from ideal.
The patients who took part in the reduced prescription experiment, they loved it and said their looking appeared softer and calmer.
The question might arise, how will the reduced power of the lens improve the vision. This is because a reduced prescription allows you to teach your brain and your eyes to work more harmoniously as partners, and that made total sense to me. If we lift something with our own hands, it will give strength to hands, arms and shoulders and if we always use some machine aid to get things lifted, the strength of our arms will be reduced. In the case of eyes, if we have the complete aid of lenses to see things, the strength of our eye muscles will get reduced and yes that happened to most of us. Every time we go to a doctor to get our eye sight checked, we have to update our lenses with higher power and that keeps on increasing.
The Doctor also noticed in the experiment that if the vision clarity was less than 83.6% or 20/40, the world appeared too blurry and the patient got frustrated.
If I would know it before, I wouldn’t get my lenses updated to higher power until I have blurry sight with current lenses and perhaps I never had to go for surgery 🙁
But I hope after reading this, you’ll read the book yourself and ask your eye doctor for 20/40 prescription. 🙂
PS – This is not paid promotion or marketing, I just found the book useful, so sharing it.
Thank you.