Reducing/eliminating myopia
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I've heard a number of therapies/methods which purport to do such a thing from Bates' style exercise to wearing reduced diopter prescriptions and applying butter or egg whites to eye (ngolo on twitter).
Has anyone ever succeeded in doing so reliably? Particularly interested in cases with say, -6+ diopters.
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@Coriander Very limited advice from -7+ dioptries, but what helped me stop it from decreasing further during start of uni (it'd climb up a dioptrie/dioptrie and a half for a while after) is therapy with higher dioptries for half a month every few months. Slowly climbing in dioptries (up to like -13 - -15) and training in reading the last line on the standardised test, until it becomes consistently good and increasing the dioptries. Plus doing a full eye relaxation excercise afterwards.
Tried doing the zog-recommendation excercises of changing eye focus for a while, etc. but that did nothing at all.
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@Coriander The reduced lens endmyopia method seems to be genuine, being a product of cumulative trial and error w/ many stories of improvement as well as a semi-complete model of how myopia develops, but the information on this method is so horrendously scattered and incomplete and probably by intentional design, as its figurehead Jake Steiner is first and foremost a businessman who over the years has taken numerous steps towards paywalling most sites and almost paywalled the endmyopia wiki page.
So as far as I understand it, closeup viewing makes the ciliary muscle tense up in order to focus light correctly on the retina and if a person has low energy production and/or mineral deficiencies the muscle, being in closeup mode for several continuous hours (not uncommon in our times) gives out and spasms, you have probably noticed your vision being worse after a long day of closeup work. This stage is referred to as pseudomyopia. After a person gets prescribed glasses which are usually overcorrected and wear them at close distance, eg. looking at computer screen, the ciliary muscle has to work overtime to keep the light from reflecting behind the retina, since it's already spasmed what usually ends up happening over the course of time is the eyeball growing slightly in length to compensate for the muscle, a process called hyperopic defocus. When you look at the distance in this condition with the eyeball having grown and the back of the eye being slightly further back the light now focuses in front of the retina. You buy a new stronger pair of glasses and the cycle repeats until you end up at -7 diopter range.
As far as I understand the eye is dense in mitochondria and the blue light emitting from screens definitely enhances the problem by making the ciliary muscle less resistant to stress.
To reverse myopia you basically have to get rid of 'blur adaptation' which is a subconscious phenomena, similar to learned helplessness and most likely driven by serotonin, Ray mentioned too that serotonin induces myopia in animals so keeping it low is very important in this journey.
For the details of improvement I think this guy explains it well
Youtube Video -
@Dulkadir Yeah that's one of the best introductions. Welcome to the rabbithole, OP:
https://endmyopia.org/
https://wiki.endmyopia.org/ -
@vajra @Coriander that guy also runs a discord channel centered around this community which I think is helpful , since the original endmyopia forum is paywalled as well.. good place to get your questions answered and further read on the topic
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@Dulkadir I'll check it out. Thank you for your informative reply.
I have heard of people suggesting progesterone eyedrops for reducing serotonin ocular-ly. In the past, I tried using "print pushing" by Todd Becker. The idea made sense, but I couldn't figure out the finer points of how to do so, while managing studies/job and I ultimately forgot about it.
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@Coriander yeah printpushing works I heard. Many people as well as ray hve mentioned how their eyesight improves in higher elevation and after bag breathing, makes sense since co2 displaces lactate among other things, maybe helps clear up muscle spasm. I would also try putting an incandescent bulb somehwere around your work area & computer, would probably help as well
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@Coriander I've been trying the reduced lens method for about a year now. Worked very well at first, but progress has since stopped. Probably time for new lenses again. There's a 4chan method I saw that involves wearing an eyepatch, alternating which eye it's on every half hour. Haven't had the chance to test it, but people claim it works.
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@niggergroyper88 I'm guessing the patch method works by reducing ciliary muscle strain, same reason why people report the most improvement on endmyopia in the first few weeks to months.. But it by itself won't really allow you to go full way.. to reduce myopia fully you need to reverse axial elongation which you can really only do thru myopic defocus .
Did you reduce by 0.25 diopters everytime you dropped? if you print out a 6m Snellen chart and the 20/20 line is generally devoid of blur from 6 meters away then it's probably time to drop unless you have strong unresolved double vision or like some other nuance like wanting to drop astigmatism prescription down a notch or somthing -
Does the egg thing work? What's the mechanism behind that?
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@CurmudgeonApple Of course it works, Aajonus says so. Eggs are able to grow a cute little baby chick, which does in fact have functioning eyes, therefore eggs have all of the nutrients needed for functioning eyes. Therefore by putting egg whites into your eyes your vision will improve. Simple stuff that doesn't make any crazy leaps.
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@LinDaiyu lol, noted
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it is worth trying niacinamide eye drops, distilled water + good quality niacinamide. I don't remember the niacinamide per drop but you can always start lower and add more drops. it will sting, but that's ok, that's supposed to happen. you can also add thiamine. I remember this improving my vision quite a bit, but its been a while since I've done it
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@CurmudgeonApple Effects are minor, but I've tried it for ~1 week periods before and it definitely works. Just speculation here, but it seems to give a temporary boost rather than permanent improvement.
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Something that looks interesting is the glasses from Kubota Pharmaceuticals. They use micro LEDs to project a myopically defocused image into the eyes.
It isn't clear if actually reversal can occur or if it is just for stopping the progression. The info that first came out often mentioned reversal.
Here is some info
"Innovative, first-in-class myopia control devices seeking to reduce the progression of myopia by projecting myopically-defocused virtual images generated using micro-LEDS on the peripheral visual field to actively stimulate the retina
➢ Passive stimulation using myopic defocus is already in use in an FDA-approved contact lens
➢ Projecting a myopically defocused image on the peripheral retina generates a growth signal that moves the retina inwards, inhibiting myopia progression, while a hyperopically defocused image causes the reverse effect"This suggests reversal is possible. Also in one of their patents reversal is mentioned.
Then there is this study showing axial length shortening and myopia reversal using their tech.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9279468/
"the estimated treatment effect improved by 6.051 microns (95% CI: 1.500 to 10.604 microns; p = 0.006) per month of treatment (Fig. 4); that is, with each month of treatment, the test eye becomes 6.051 microns shorter than that of the control eye."
"Using a repeated-measures regression model, the estimated treatment effect improved by 0.068 D (95% CI: 0.011 to 0.125; p = 0.011) per month of treatment."
The glasses are available for five thousand dollars, sold specifically for halting progression, so my concern is that maybe due to legal reasons they had to limit the tech to only halt progression not reverse.
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I can't address the question of whether 6+ diopters could restore back their vision (I don't actually know how bad 6+ diopter vision is, as my vision wasn't so bad that my glasses were thick).
But I was nearsightedness since high school, and 15 years ago had reached an age where I would need to change to bifocals because In began to have difficulty reading small print. But no thanks to eye exercises, my vision improved such that last year I passed the vision test for my driver's license exam with flying colors, and I was no longer required to wear glasses for driving.
But I have tried different vision exercises over the years, but admit to not having the discipline to see any of them through.
But looking back, I had to figure out what I did in my nutrition and lifestyle that made my sight improve. By the way, I failed to mention that my reading vision improved also so I'm only not nearsighted, but also not farsighted.
Since I did not set out to improve my vision, and that it came about as a consequence of doing something Peaty, it is all the more remarkable because I happened to be doing what was needed to improve my vision.
Around 2016, after learning of Ray Peat the man and his ideas, I latched on to his advice to eat a serving of beef liver once a week for its retinol (or vitamin A). I thought that was the only thing I could attribute my eyesight improvement to. Until I read an article he wrote where he said that having an abundance of CO2 in the eyes is what keeps the eyes clear and free from developing cataract and glaucoma.
So I think having a good metabolism, where CO2 is continually produced and used by the body, is instrumental to good eyesight. And intake of the retinol form of vitamin A.
And I'm not even sure if beta-carotene can substitute for retinol, even as beta-carotene is the form I always hear being extolled. A younger sister of mine told me recently her eye doctor gave her a heads up that she may be due for cataract surgery in a few years. I say this because she supplements a lot, as she sells for Shaklee, a well-known network marketer and manufacturer of vitamin supplements. And the vitamin A she supplements with is in beta-carotene form.
The takeaway for me is to not underestimate the power of living a lifestyle that Ray Peat advocates, based on relying on mitochondrial oxidation, and to be fully adequate in vitamins and minerals. Eye exercises help a lot, but alone without good nutrition, you may not be covering all the bases needed.
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It would be nice to have more data on this subject.
dopamine from sunlight exposure has an antimyopia effect.
I'm going to use tyrosine and phenylalanine on my eyes as an experiment, along with several hours of bright light exposure. sodium bicarbonate too. I'll try to maintain this for a while.
If anyone has adamantane/diamant (or another dopaminergic), consider using it in your eyes for a few months and report the results.
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the problem is - who has time to do this?
The eye habits would interfere with your entire life, driving etc
You could only do the eye habits in your spare time