My goodness. It certainly looks like Otis Brown has hijacked this thread from jimboston.
jimboston's original posting lays out the framework: he is "scientifically minded" and appears to have followed a fairly rigorous test of following the Edge-of-Blur (EoB) protocol for a whole year. He knows the data is spurious because the population of the experiment is on himself (i.e., n=1). That there has been no effect of this approach for him only means that we can say with certainty that it doesn't work for him. Yet, the fact that something that incorporates this approach seems to work with others-- although we should be cautious about taking the word of anyone who says there has been improvement--suggests that we should not immediately disqualify EoB. And we certainly should not devolve to attacks, and personal ones at that, on jimboston's observations.
I have followed some approach for reducing my myopia over the last two years starting with the Frauenfeldclinic.com approach, and have had some luck, with my full prescription going down from -5.5 to about -4.5. It might be that I was overprescribed to begin with (I have been wearing glasses for 50 years; the -5.5 prescription I got about 5 years ago), and I am one of those whose nearsightedness reduces itself in middle age (I am 62). I follow the edge-of-blur approach, but not religiously, but I do wear a weaker prescription of -1 to -2.5 for reading (I have the adjustable focus SuperFocus glasses--don't bother looking them up; they went out of business).
Some questions I started pondering this past year have been:
--When and how in the course of a 24-hour period does the eye actually change its axial length? When does that small incremental (yet permanent) change happen when the emmetropic eye becomes nearsighted, or indeed, the other way, when the myopic gets less so? Is it during the 10 minutes during which one is doing the edge-of-blur practice? Is it during some hours afterwards as the effects sink in?
--Is it likely that the eyeball axial length changes merely as a result of some physical input or physiological stress (too much near-point accommodation)? Does the reverse positive stress (e.g., EoB) work, and how would it work?
--What is that intricate dance of stimulus and response that causes the eyeball to change shape so that it can function with the least possible amount of stress, and how can we tap into that so that the result is lessened myopia?
--Is there some sort of "communication" between the shape of the eyeball and how vision is perceived in the brain's visual cortex? Is there some stimulus that we can apply to the visual cortex side to promote some positive change in the eyes themselves?
While I do not consistently practice EoB, what I do consistently practice is what I call "seeing space," a concept that I came across in a marvelous piece by the late Dr Antonia Orfield, available here
http://www.visionsofjoy.org/pdfs/OrfieldSeeingSpace.pdf. She put herself through optometry school
after finding her eyesight improving after a regimen that combined exercise, nutrition and postural training. She was a successful practicing optometrist specializing in safeguarding childhood vision. (The article first appeared in the
Journal of Behavioral Optometry; please don't put any weight on the fact that it has been reposted on the Vision of Joy website, which seems a little too colorful in matters of vision improvement.) I have mentioned this article of hers a few times before in this site, but it does not seem to have piqued anyone's interest.
I was very taken by these statements of hers:
"[Functional myopia] is a reflection of the shrinking of the
brain's space world by closure of the periphery, first by stress, and then by errors of spatial judgment induced by minus lenses." [Emphasis mine.]
and
"[Myopic children's] habits and lenses have programmed their brains to think of vision as looking
at something and seeing only that. To cure myopia, one has to re-program the brain to
see space." [Emphasis in the original.]
Indeed, I have found that when I am out and about with a weaker prescription (0.50 less or so), I find a sense of better acuity if I try to sense how far objects are from me and where they are relative to each other, rather than how sharp they are. I am following Dr. Orfield's advice of seeing the space, and looking at objects. The effect is that I feel that I am immersed the environment, and not just looking at things in it.
(An interesting, though I hope not discouraging, point about Orfield's experience. If I recall the details right, she reduced her myopia from -4.5 to -0.50 in the space of 6 or 7 years. This might seem like a preposterous amount of time, but consider how long it takes a child to go from 0.00 to -4 or -5: typically the length of their middle to high school years, which is about 5-7 years. So her reversal is nothing more than following the natural rate of change in the eyeball axial length control mechanism, although happily in the reverse direction.)
Back to jimboston's post: If we are scientific, then if something is not working, try something else--anything else. I suggest that the visual system is far too complex to be reduced to a single theory of EoB or Bates or whatever when we seek improvement in acuity. I also suspect that all organisms must naturally have self-optimizing mechanisms for maximal performance. In the case of vision improvement, it seems that we might want to bring the brain, the visual cortex's "sense of seeing", and whatever other factors we are not even aware of now into the mix of how we can triangulate on, identify, and then tap into such a self-optimizing mechanism.
