Here's an unavoidable fact of life for just about everyone over age 40. Eventually you'll hear yourself saying seven inevitable words: "I can't read it without my glasses." It may start in a restaurant when a menu looks blurry, or when you pick up the phone book to find a telephone number. Eventually, most of us surrender to the inevitable and realize we need reading glasses. It's a natural consequence of aging.

Or is it?

Exercise programs for the eyes have been around since the early 1900s. They occupy a nebulous space somewhere between medical science and folk remedy. Most ophthalmologists and optometrists are dismissive of them, yet these programs abound. They include Dr. Friedman's Vision Training Program (Bantam)... Lisette Scholl's Visionetics: The Holistic Way to Better Eyesight (Doubleday)... Taber's Eye-Robics (www.eyerobics.net).

And -- can the new crop of "natural" self-help vision programs being hawked on the Internet and late-night television actually help baby boomers throw away their reading glasses?

NOT FOR PRESBYOPIA

Not very likely. "The need for reading glasses is caused by a condition known as presbyopia," said E. Michael Geiger, OD, an optometrist and author of Eye Care Naturally (Safe Goods). "You have a lens in your eye called the crystalline lens that continually changes shape so you can focus. That's how you see from far to near," he told me. "All cells in the body, as they die, are carried away by the bloodstream, or they're sloughed off in the skin or cut off in the hair. They're disposed of, and new cells replace them. In the eye, some cells are sloughed off, but most of these old cells have nowhere to go. The lens is in a capsule, with no way out. So the old cells stay within the capsule and the capsule starts to get more and more encapsulated. By the time men are 45 and women are 40, the lens can be so "crowded" that it simply can't flex enough for close reading. Hence the need for reading glasses. How in the world anyone is going to change this basic physiological process with exercises is beyond me," Dr. Geiger said.

MAYBE FOR OTHER CONDITIONS

While eye exercises -- also known as vision therapy -- may not help for presbyopia, they may be helpful for some other conditions. There is a proven segment of vision therapy known as orthopics that can help with symptoms of visual strain or fatigue in individuals with mild eye coordination or focus problems, double vision or even strabismus ("crossed" or turned eyes) and amblyopia ("lazy eye"). A fundamental premise of vision therapy is that refractive disorders, such as myopia (nearsightedness) and hyperopia (farsightedness), have both hereditary and environmental causes, such as nearpoint stress (excessive and prolonged focusing on objects close at hand) from reading. Certain eye exercises are designed to relieve so-called spasms of accommodation, which are disruptions of the eye's ability to focus due to eyestrain from the environment. Other exercises are said to improve the eyes' coordination or to straighten misaligned eyes.

SEE CLEARLY ON THE SEE CLEARLY METHOD

The See Clearly Method involves 30 minutes of exercises a day to strengthen and enhance the flexibility of the muscles that govern the eye's focusing power and control its movements. Many of the techniques are holdovers from a vision-therapy regimen developed in the 1920s by maverick New York City ophthalmologist William Horatio Bates, MD. In addition, the instruction manual recommends personal affirmations ("I am seeing better each day") and visualization. Many docs remain skeptical. "The eye muscles never atrophy," Dr. Geiger told me.

A long-standing criticism of eye exercises, coming from both mainstream optometrists as well as from eye surgeons, is the absence of reliable evidence that they can reduce your reliance on corrective lenses at all, let alone eliminate it. The medical literature lacks well-controlled clinical studies -- with strict scientific criteria including carefully matched comparison populations -- showing that they effectively treat either nearsightedness or farsightedness. Indeed, the first sentence of the See Clearly research page states that "No formal research studies have been done on the See Clearly Method," and the testimonials for the method are preceded by the disclaimer, "Individual results will vary."

The best advice may be to keep your expectations in check. Maybe you will have visual improvement with the See Clearly Method or other eye exercise programs, though many experts doubt it. As Dr. Geiger says, "While diet and lifestyle may be able to help keep some elements of vision beyond the lens' focus in check, there's nothing that can be done to change the dying of the cells."

Of course a general interest in the direction of healing for Peace of mind doesn't hurt anyone.

Be well,

Carole Jackson
Bottom Line's Daily Health News

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