Improving vision naturally

[Tiger_ Moth]

Does anyone know about this Bates stuff and how to improve your eyesight naturally?
I need to know things like :
1)what exactly you do and how often
2)How long it takes to see what kind of improvement ( given eyes around -3D)
3)Would you have to keep on doing it: if you did it, improvesd your sight but then stopped would your eyesight gradually go back to how bad it was before?
4)Does it work on everyone?
5)would you recommend it?

My optician didnt seem to think it would help too much. What do you think?

thanks

[henry crun]

You should ask yourself the following questions.
1 How many millions of people (lots of them pilots and wannabes) currently wear glasses and would love to be rid of them ?.

2. How many millions of people resort to expensive laser treatment or put up with the discomfort of contacts ?.

3. If a method existed of helping those whose vision is less than perfect how many of those above would be hammering on the door of the person who discovered such a method ?.

If your answers are 1. too many to count,
2.too many to count, and 3. too many to count, then it should give you food for thought.

PS. I'm a member of the sceptics society and wear glasses.

[ 25 August 2001: Message edited by: henry crun ]

[smith]

OWT :rolleyes:

[Hermie]

Hi,

I'm a follower of the Bates method. It seriously works for me. It takes alot of patience, faith and belief.

People like henry crun and the too many other people who are too LAZY to practice their eyesights so as to make it improve NATURALLY, resort to glasses and expensive laser treatment.

Well, its true millions of people would love to get rid of them(glasses) but most of them are just too LAZY, either that, they REFUSE to belief that their eyes can cure naturally.

It definitely takes time and alot of patience but if DON'T have that, then you are the 'too many other people' who are just not different !

Tiger_Moth, belief in yourself, I did, and my eyesight has improved and it still continues to improve day by day.

I belief in this saying:
In Life There Is Hope, In Hope There Is Life

Best Regards,
Herman :cool:

[ 25 August 2001: Message edited by: Hermie ]

[Speedbird59]

Hi

Bates does work. I was at my worst needing a prescription of -3.25D and now I'm at the -2.5D level. I am at a sticking point though. Having said that my sight is good enough for class 1 standards.

The problem with Bates is that it takes time and is rather tedious. We live in a world where we expect fast results with little effort. Unfortunately Bates isn't like that - it takes persiverance to make it work.

There was also another book called "Better Sight Without Glasses" by a chap called Harry Benjamin which is well worth a read.

It is interesting that no opthamologists have come out publicly and opposed Bates' theories. As Bates himself said he would challenge anyone to say that he was a fraud if they could prove his theories wrong.

I'm a bit of cynic myself and one reason I believe that there is not more known about it that there are several industries that rely on defects of sight for their existance. Large companies such as Pilkingtons, Bausch & Lomb, Johnson & Johnson make a hefty proportion of their profits from the fact that most people believe there is no way they can improve their sight.

[ 25 August 2001: Message edited by: Speedbird59 ]

[Grainger]

What I suspect Bates does is it strengthens the muscles that change the shape of the lens, thus increasing slightly the range of accommodation.

This could give a perceived improvement of a dioptre or so in mildly short-sighted folk as you describe.

What it can NOT do is to permanently change the shape of the eyeball, lens or cornea.

As with all exercise, I guess it will all go to hell again when you stop exercising.

Only you can decide whether it makes any difference to YOU and whether or not it's worth all the effort.

[Cypres]

It was a scientific fact that the earth was flat, it was also a scientific fact that it was impossible to travel faster than the speed of sound.
It is also a scientific fact that eyesight can only be improved by glasses.....(watch this space).

Eagle 1 (In answer to your question from the "Pinhole Glasses Thread")

The method (and there is really only the one main culprit) which makes your vision go downhill is to simply wear glasses. I’ve tried this particular method for the last ten years and it’s worked a treat for me, my vision has never been worse than since I started to use glasses.

One thing that I think must be made clear is that the Bates’ method is nothing to do with “Exercises”. Exercises implies straining muscles and Bates was dead against this.
Bates's methods are about removing muscle strain and opening your mind and vision to the world.
Many people use the term exercise in conjunction with the techniques used by Bates’ vision teachers and it does them an injustice. There are no muscle exercises that are going to improve your sight.
But there are techniques to improve your sight.

Tiger_Moth / Eagle 1

Here is a summary of the things that I did to improve my sight, but I must stress that these were just some of the many tricks you can use to cajole you eyes and more importantly you mind into better visual perception:

Firstly it may be useful to describe the state of my vision before I started trying to improve matters.

My two visual problems were long-sight in both eyes and suppression of my right eye.

Suppression of the right eye was probably my main problem, years of visual suppression had made this eye virtually useless by itself.
The eye was impossible to focus properly at all distances and the image from it was unpleasant (e.g. like the snowy noise you sometimes get on a TV picture). This didn’t really affect my day to day sight since my brain had stealthily adapted to the poor image and had decided to ignore this eye. Therefore I only ever became aware of the poor sight from my right eye if my left eye was inadvertently obscured.

I had been aware of this for some years and had raised these concerns with the various opticians I had visited.
They just said it was unfortunate and I would effectively have to live with it since to an optician your sight is fixed in tablets of stone from eight years old.

The right eye was +3.5 dioptres and the left eye +3.0 dioptres. The trouble is that once you get a differential like this it tends to re-enforce the suppression of the worse eye. The worse eye is then unlikely to correct itself since the image is poor, therefore it gets suppressed, because it is suppressed the brain doesn’t bother to try to focus it properly and the image gets worse ( and so the cycle continues… ;)

Here are the tricks I’ve been using to stop the suppression and balance the eyes.

1) Funny specs with no lenses

Purpose: To ensure both eyes are being perceived and the brain is using a fused image.

These are easy to make, mine comprised a pair of old glasses with the lenses popped out.
You need to mount a piece of thin material about the size of a credit card with a different colour on each side on the bridge of the glasses. Mount it vertically (with blue tack) protruding forwards so that it effectively partitions your two eyes from each other.
(The shorter edge in the vertical plane and the longer edge in the horizontal plane pointing forwards).

You will look like a complete tit wearing these and if anyone catches you they will take the **** !
(I’ve just worn mine around the house – preferably while the wife was out since it just made her burst into fits of laughter!)
However, when you have your class 1 you can smile to yourself and think of that shiny jet out there waiting for you to fly it.
We’ll assume the card is coloured Red on one side and Green on the other for this text but any colour combination will do.

The following text assumes that with the glasses on and looking forwards the Red side is exposed to the left eye and the Green side is exposed to the right eye.
(If you’ve just done air law this will make sense)

N.B. Don’t try to look at the coloured cards themselves, just remain peripherally aware of their existence.

When you have plucked up the nerve to wear this contraption this is what you should see if you are not suppressing an eye (whilst looking at an object say 3 - 6 metres away).
You should see the Red card out to the right and the green card out to the left.

Now you are probably thinking he’s made a typing mistake or maybe Cypres is just plain stupid.

Surely it should be the Red card out to the left and the Green card out to the right. NO.

What should happen is that the left eye perceives the Red card on the right hand side of its image, the right eye perceives the green card on the left hand side of its image. When the images from the two eyes are correctly fused you will perceive the red card to be on the right and the green card to be on the left.

If you are suppressing an eye you will only be aware of one of the coloured cards.
Lets assume you suppress the right eye, whilst looking off to the distance you will only see the Red card.

If you don’t see the cards correctly then try blinking like mad and look at a scene that has lots of movement in it. This should help to wake-up the suppressed image and bring it to your conscious minds attention.

Above all never look directly at the cards themselves, this achieves nothing.

One thing you may notice is that if you look at something close up the cards appear to converge at their tips, this is due to your focal distance changing and indicates good balanced usage of both eyes.

2) Using pencils

Again this may help you, hold two different coloured pencils one in each hand.
Hold one pencil at arm’s length with the other at half an arms length. Both pencils should be aligned centrally between you eyes.
Focus on the furthest pencil but remain peripherally aware of the closer pencil.
You should be aware of two of the closer pencils.
Now change focus to the closed pencil, this time there will be one closer pencil and two of the more distant pencils.

3) Palming / Resting the eyes

Why doesn’t sleep work as good as, if not better than, palming?

Palming does two things, it rests the eyes and it allows the conscious mind to be trained.
By this I mean that when all light has been obscured from the eye you would think one would see a completely black image.
Very few people do, and if you’ve tried it you will know what I mean. You may see Grey, blobs of light and all manner of garbage.
All of this visual rubbish isn’t coming from your eyes its your brain and its imagination.
One of the ideas of Palming is to try to perceive a completely black image when there is no light entering the eyes.
This requires mental control and purpose of thought which aren’t there when you are asleep.
In fact when you are asleep you see all manner of rubbish (i.e. Dreams).

I’m pissed off typing now so I’ll finish the rest off ( 4,5,6,7,& 8) at a later date.


4) Magic images

5) Using paper blobs

6) Blink like you life depends on it.

7) Peripheral awareness.

8) Central fixation.


My best suggestion is to locate a Bates’ vision teacher near you from their web site www.seeing.org (http://www.seeing.org) and make an appointment.

In closing, I must point out that my main inspiration was a ppruner called Mr Magoo who used a Bates’ vision teacher to improve his sight and get a Class 1. It was reading his many posts that prompted me to give it a try.
I am very grateful to Mr Magoo for taking the time to make the posts he did and spurring me on to do something positive about my Class 1 knock back instead of throwing the towel in.

[ 25 August 2001: Message edited by: Cypres ]

[ 25 August 2001: Message edited by: Cypres ]

[henry crun]

Hermie: you will notice that I did not say the system does not work for some.
I gave an opinion, perhaps a little harshly, that expectations of this system should be approached with some caution.

My feelings about the Bates method are coloured by the experience of someone I know who desperately wanted it to work. This person had faith and tried very hard for a long time, all to no avail.

The disappointment of this failure was made all the worse by the fact that the high expectations of even a measurable improvement were not realised.

For myself, you are quite right, I do not have the faith that it would work for me because, as I stated, I am a sceptic.

[silverknapper]

Well guys having failed a class 1 I have nothing to lose - knock it all you want but by jings I will try anything it takes

[Al Weaver]

For what it's worth. I've worn glasses for 20 years with ever increasing power for both reading and driving (still mild prescription). I updated my glasses in late March this year. In late April I underwent open heart surgery to change out a valve. I came out of the surgery with lots of floaters for about 2 weeks. I than noticed that I no longer needed driving (distance) glasses. I mentioned this to the eye doctor and his comment was that anything that changes the blood flow to the eye could affect vision.

Well at least there was one benefit to Open Heart valve changeout.

[henry crun]

lomapaseo: these things happen sometimes.
I recently read of a lady who had been virtually blind for many years and had her sight restored after an accidental knock to the head.
Sure, not back to perfect vision but a 1000% improvement on what she had before.

I take it you are not recommending your method to people like myself with no heart problems ! :)

[Al Weaver]

"I take it you are not recommending your method to people like myself with no heart problems !"

Your mileage may vary ;)

[Grainger]

Once again, Bates can not change the shape of the eyeball, the lens or the cornea.
What it can do is to train (if you don't like the word 'exercise') the muscles that control the shape of the lens.

Whether 'they' said the world was or wasn't flat, or whether or not one has an 'open mind' (whatever that means !) is irrelevant. You may derive some benefit from the Bates technique, and if it works for you then congratulations. But it is not magic, and the effects, I suspect, are not permanent without continuous repetition.

As with anything else, in order to avoid disappointment you have to separate wishful thinking from common sense.

[Apollo]

Any word on "FLOATERS". I have excellent eyesight but an annoying problem is I have FLOATERS. The two eye Doctors I go to say it's not threatening to my eyesight but it's very distracting. Any one have any advice???

[Cosmo]

Over the course of a year or so, I've had an improvement of -1.0 diopters in each eye. I was at worst at -3.25 in my left eye and -3.5 in my right.

What I started doing was pretty simple actually. I got into the habit of taking my glasses off more and more. I wear old weaker glasses at home, none when reading or using my computer.

The problem in my case was that my vision was over-corrected. Doing a lot of near work with my glasses on (I'm still studying at Uni.) stressed the muscle around my lenses (the ones inside the eye behind the cornea). For the eye to see an object at close range requires accommodation of the lens. The lens needs to refract more light for close-range objects. To get this result, the muscles of the lens contract. So when I spent a lot of time staring at papers (usually I'm too tired to actually read them :D) my eyes got strained. Consequently it became difficult for the lens muscles to relax, which is needed for far range vision.

I'm not sure if I'll get any further improvement. However, mine has so far improved significantly. The conclusion would seem that you can at least eliminate eye strain induced over-correction. So I suspect I'll get my vision down to a level which is then only influenced by the shape of my eyeball.

After this positive change I thought that I'd give eye exercises a whirl. If I get any results using those I'll post an update.

Regards,

Cosmo

(Note, not to be confused with Cosmo Kramer, someone else's handle)

[v1rotate]

Cypres,

Very interesting info and I thank you for you time in writing it. I have now fashioned a glasses (from an old coat hangar) and wear it around the house with my wife laughing at me.

I have only been doing the Bates method for a short period (2 months) so I don't think I can comment on the results.

My right eye is 6/6 and the left is 7.5/9. But I feel that my left eye is very weak and I am worried that I may not pass my next class 1.

I got my eyes checked at one of those high street optometrists (those free eyesight checks) and the results are difficult to understand and I was hoping that someone could clarify these.

Right Eye: SPH 0.00, CYL -0.50, AX 144
Left Eye: SPH +0.25, CYL -0.75, AX 47

Is the SPH the same as the Dioptres reading?

v1rotate
:cool:

[Grainger]

V1: the SPH is the basic spherical correction: + is far-sighted, - is near-sighted. With 0.00 and 0.25 dioptres you have minimal correction. (Dioptre is 1/[focal length in metres] - so 0.25 dioptres is 4 metres etc)

The CYL/AX figures ar the astigmatism (cylindrical correction). CYL is the dioptres and AX is the axis, or orientation of the cylindrical correction. For the Class 1 they will add the SPH and CYL components to give a total correction, but this will take you nowhere near the +/- 5 dioptres limit.

[v1rotate]

Grainger,

Thank you very much for the information. At least now I know what it means. Thanks once again.

v1...rotate :)

[sets]

I need a little help interpreting the JAA Class 1 vision requirements. I understand that there has been a relaxing of the limits to +/-5 diopters. My corrections are

-2.00/-2.50 x 177
-2.50/-2.25 x 077

These both total to under the 5 diopter limit but the old requirements also had a limit on the maximum astigmatic component (less than 2 diopters). Is this still the case with the new requirements ? If yes, then I think I'm still out of luck ??

[Cosmo]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think the limit for an initial Class one is still +/- 3. Astigmatism is added to spherical correction (I think it's called that) to determine whether or not one meets the requirements.

The +/- 5 diopter limit is, I believe, for renewals. A total refractional error of -5, for example, could be accepted if you've got enough flying experience.

I was in "the loop" as regards these matters a while ago, albeit not in the UK.

Cosmo

[basil fawlty]

Saying that glasses are a cure for vision problems is like saying a crutch is a cure for a broken leg!! :D
Yes, the Bates method does work, and I tend to use it every day for a month or so on the run up to medicals!! However the improvement is limited, and I'm certain that it would never yield 6/6.

[Tricka]

There is another method using hard contact lens at night call ortho-kitopic(I think). Will produce results almost instantly but the catch is you'll have to wear them every night, maybe every second night for life. Works by reshaping the eye without the side effects of laser and can not be detected.

[fhchiang]

bates method should work on most individual

except those with biological disorder... eyeball to long...



otherwise, if it's just refractive error... bates mtehod can improve your eyesight

[rmmonteiro]

hi all,
where can i find information on what exercises to do whith bates method??

i think that hard lens ( ortho K i think) can be detected, anyone have informations??

cheers

RMM

[Hawk]

http://www.pprune.org/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=121472&highlight=Bates+method

http://www.pprune.org/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=114820&highlight=bates+method

[Like This - Do That]

PPRuNers

I've been using Ortho - K since before I started flying in 1996. I was short sighted L -2.25, R -1.75. I still use the lenses every night, and my vision is now superb. However, I believe it doesn't work as well for everyone as it has for me.

I had no problems with CASA / DAMEs getting a class 1 medical. I have no specified conditions or restrictions in my medical. I think a sharp opthamologist can pick up the flattened cornea that results from Ortho - K. Does that matter, though? It probably would for the military aircrew but unlikely nowadays for civvie street.

The advantages include the 'reversible' nature - leave the lenses out and over several days you'll drift back to your original short sightedness. LASIK etc is not reversible.

I tried Bates about 10 years ago and I'd be amazed if it did me any good. I can't see how Bates will take you from -2 to perfect. Ortho - K can. It has just been trialled by Uni of NSW for treating long sightedness, as well.

Cheers

[ATCO1979]

Hi,
Does anyone have anymore information on the Ortho - K method? I have had a quick search on the internet and can't find anything!
Any suggestions where to look?

Thanks

(After a few hrs....)

I should have looked harder! :O
Have found various links if anybody is interested.

http://www.ortho-k.net/
www.boks.org.uk/
google search on orthokeratology (ortho-k) has loads

Cheers :D

[Echo T]

Hiya!

ive read all the comments made about Mr. Bates sounds very interesting. If he has made a difference for you guys i might as well try his methods. But does anyone know how i can get a hold of this book ive searched the web page but cant find it.

also how long does it take to improve vision?

thanks

E.T