Better Eyesight Without Glasses

In 1977 I decided to try contact lens for the first time. Pre-disposable lens and soft lens, I chose the new thinner flex-lens kind. They were a pain to get accustomed to, but I finally got the trick of putting them in, taking them out, and cleaning them. The only mishap I had with them was when my maid, Ernestine, dusted one of them away that I had placed on my dresser for a few minutes while I took a shower. Bless her heart, she never dusted again after that. But I digress, which is easy to do when I'm writing a review of a book I read so long ago. What I plan to do is to share my memories of the events surrounding my reading of Dr. Bates's book and my attempts to see without corrective lens of any kind.
About the same time I had started the flex-lens, I came across this book on seeing without glasses. I read it assiduously, ready to believe it was possible and to do all the exercises. I spent time palming my eyes (covering them with the palms of my hands to rest them, doing the eye rotation exercises, and testing my eyes daily with a wall eyechart. Not much happened, but I continued anyway.
Then one memorable day, my eyes cleared up - I could see clearly without glasses! Signs along the highway were readable, my contact lens were left in the drawer back home and I could see. There was a little refraction around the edges of objects, but not enough to bother me. I felt wonderful. The next day the wonderful feeling was gone because my eyesight had returned to its normal myopic state and I needed glasses or flex-lens again. What was wrong? I re-doubled my efforts at Bates' exercises and began looking around for other explanations. I found a discouraging one, but one that fitted all the facts as I experienced them: my eyes had begun to accommodate themselves to the shape of the flex-lens and retained that shape for a time after I took them off. I got one or two days like that again later while I was still wearing the flex-lens, but no longer sustained periods of good, uncorrected eyesight.
Soon I switched to the very first soft lens contacts and they were a miserable failure as well. Yes, they corrected my eyesight and were comfortable, but they were also very expensive, and required replacement regularly. Plus there was one major drawback that no one hears about: wind blowing hard against one's face while wearing contacts is very uncomfortable. Seems the soft ones were slightly better for me while riding a motorcycle, but since I was using my motorcycle and convertible MG TD a lot, the contacts finally had to go since I was mostly wearing eyeglasses again.
Since that time, I have refused to attempt any contact lens or other corrections of my eyesight. I wear Zeiss unifocal lens as the lightest and best vision (and most expensive) lens I could find and I am very happy every time I put on my glasses to have the correction and convenience of lens that I can take on and off at my ease, that don't pop out of my eyes and disappear, and that allow me to see comfortably and feel at ease in a strong breeze.
This is only my own case history of using what is called the Bates Method for "Better Eyesight Without Glasses." Since my adventures in achieving what the title suggests is possible, several new technologies have come and some have gone. Lasik surgery is the newest procedure, replacing the earlier RK surgical procedure that didn't last long enough for me to learn to spell it. With Lasik, a computer guides a laser beam to reshape the eye's seeing surface. The claims for success match those of the previous panaceas like contact lens, flex-lens, soft lens, disposable lens, RK surgery, and the current fad of Lasik.
I have paid my dues back in the late 70s and early 80s. I spent a lot of money to see without glasses and came back to my old friends after the new ones were so expensive and inconvenient. As my eyeballs change shape with age, I can trust that I will be able to see clearly without having any foreign object touching my eyeballs, not even a laser beam. I can see clearly near and far, sometimes I have to remove my glasses to see very small objects up close, but I will never have to use reading glasses to read because I had my eyes corrected by laser surgery to see clearly at a distance. All those having Lasik surgery now are at the beginning of a stage I went through twenty years ago. I'll check with them in twenty years and see how happy they are with their adventures in "better eyesight without glasses."


source:
http://www.doyletics.com/art/bewgart.htm