Hi Todd,
Subject: The only person who believes in "scientific prevention", is the person who wears the plus and "gets out of it".
Item: As you did it. It does take strong belief in science, and yourself, and your ability. It takes long-term persistence. In my judgment, prevention must be started before you go below 20/50 on your Snellen.
The "man in his office", just concludes that all prevention is impossible. Or he concludes that the only thing the "public" could ever want, is "instant sharp vision with a minus lens." I understand him with perfect clarity.
I do agree that if you do not "stop it" at 20/50, it will get increasingly permanent.
This issue of, "increasingly permanent" was in fact studied by Dr. Young and Dr. Oakley. They found that if you start wearing a strong minus, your refraction goes down at a steady rate of -1/2 diopter per year, for each year in school. I fight only to STOP that process, while you can still get yourself out of it. Here is a simplified graph of this five year study with children.
http://myopiafree.i-see.org/bifig1.gifI agree that it is hard to "read" this graph. But it shows that children who insist in reading at 6 inches and even 4 inches, will "go down" at this steady rate.
These were fundamental eyes and in a real sense, normal eyes that are highly responsive to near (as I show in the "Wildsoet" video that I posted).
To simplify: What this graph shows is that the children who wore the plus for five years - did not become nearsighted. ** The children who DID NOT wear the plus, became seriously myopic over the five years of the study. ***
** There refractive change was ZERO diopters per year. This is provided that they were willing to wear the plus for those five year - and no minus lens. I would say, "negative change in refractive STATE", but most people want to say, "eyes became longer". To me, it makes a big difference how you described the refractive states of all natural eyes. I also say that exceeding or passing the 20/40 line - by your personal verification is the success I would look for. Assuming that you managed, with your personal wisdom and persistence to BEGIN TO READ THE 20/40 LINE, and have confirmed this result yourself, you would be inclined to CONTINUE TO WEAR THE PLUS FOR ALL NEAR - and just wait for the 20/20 line to clear. But of course, I never know what any person will decide to do.
*** Quote for the Hung paper, that shows that the minus lens (defocus) creates permanent change:
Previous theories of myopia development involved subtle and complex processes such as the sensing and analyzing of chromatic aberration, spherical aberration, spatial gradient of blur, or spatial frequency content of the retinal image, but they have not been able to explain satisfactorily the diverse experimental results reported in the literature. On the other hand, our newly proposed incremental retinal-defocus theory (IRDT) has been able to explain all of these results. This theory is based on a relatively simple and direct mechanism for the regulation of ocular growth. It states that a time-averaged decrease in retinal-image defocus area decreases the rate of release of retinal neuromodulators, which decreases the rate of retinal proteoglycan synthesis with an associated decrease in scleral structural integrity. This increases the rate of scleral growth, and in turn the eye's axial length, which leads to myopia. Our schematic analysis has provided a clear explanation for the eye's ability to grow in the appropriate direction under a wide range of experimental conditions. In addition, the theory has been able to explain how repeated cycles of nearwork-induced transient myopia leads to repeated periods of decreased retinal-image defocus, whose cumulative effect over an extended period of time results in an increase in axial growth that leads to permanent myopia. Thus, this unifying theory forms the basis for understanding the underlying retinal and scleral mechanisms of myopia development.
By George Hung.
In fact, the axial length of the eye does change measurably in response to defocus. While Fonk is correct that the change is so small that you can't see or feel it subjectively, it is real. In my post "Improve eyesight - and throw away your glasses", I including a reference to an article by Read et al. showing a change of 10-20 microns after only an hour of defocus stress in either direction.
http://www.iovs.org/content/51/12/6262.full.pdf+html
Of course, the real question is how long this change in axial eye length persists, how far it can continue to progress and whether it becomes increasingly permanent with time. I'm not sure this has been studied in humans, but Hung and Ciuffreda, proponents of the IRDT theory of myopia, have show that these axial length changes do persist in chicks and other animals.
http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1241153
