You are no doubt already wondering: “What is the Bates method, and if it is so marvellous why haven’t I heard about it before?”
Briefly, the method is a way of re-educating the eyesight. Errors of refraction (that is, of focusing) are regarded as temporary abnormalities which, when exposed to the healing and self-regulatory powers of the body, can be reduced in severity or eliminated altogether.
As to why you haven’t heard about it before, there are several reasons. The first and most important is the attitude of the medical profession. In our culture we have come to rely too heavily on the theoretical approach to medicine. No cure can be truly acceptable unless and until there is a theory to explain it. The theory accounting for refractive error is the work of the German scientist Hermann von Helmholtz (1821–94), whose contribution to the study of the nervous system still dominates modern thinking. Helmholtz’s theory states that the eye accommodates (changes focus for far and near objects) by means of changes in the shape of the lens. If the lens or its muscle system is faulty, or if the eyeball is congenitally malformed, then refractive errors will arise. Although there is even now some controversy over the exact mechanism by which the lens changes its shape, orthodox science has never questioned the basic tenet of the Helmholtz theory: that it is the lens which is solely responsible for changing the focal length of the eye.
The theory is eminently reasonable. It seems to be borne out by the anatomy of the eye. Among older people, who progressively lose elasticity of the lens, refractive error is assumed to be an inevitable concomitant of the passing years, so much so that graphs have been drawn showing loss of accommodation with increasing age. Furthermore it is actually possible to see changes in the curvature of the lens: reflections in the front and back surfaces may be observed by using a small flashlight. These Purkinje images, as they are called, are taken as the next best thing to observing the act of accommodation in a cross-sectioned living eye. And, as further evidence in support of the Helmholtz theory, science would cite the apparent ease with which glasses correct optical errors.
Another serious obstacle to acceptance of the Bates method was the personality of W. H. Bates himself. Having found empirically that the Helmholtz theory was lacking, he was far too quick to formulate a rival theory. Bates’s proposal was that the eye accommodates, not by a change in the shape of the lens, but by a change in the shape of the eyeball itself, this change being brought about by the six extrinsic muscles which control the movement of the eye in its socket. Such an idea was rejected as nonsense, the more so when Bates adduced less-than-convincing evidence in some of his scientific papers dealing with accommodation in animals. From then on he became a subject of ridicule and professional hostility. His insights into the psychology of vision were ignored, as were the successes he achieved in his consulting room. These successes convinced him he was right and his colleagues wrong; he became more and more exasperated, and the dogmatic tone of his Perfect Sight Without Glasses* verges, in places, on the aggressive. This did little to win over his critics.
The Bates method was served no better by some of the people who set themselves up as teachers. For every conscientious teacher of the method there were several who understood nothing whatever about it and saw in it only a means of exploiting the desperate patients whom orthodoxy had failed. In consequence, any suggestion that there might be something in visual re-education is now dismissed as outright quackery.
This attitude of the ophthalmic profession has perhaps, in part, consciously or otherwise, been influenced by another consideration. Although by no means all members of the profession profit from the trade in glasses, there is no question but that there is a huge vested interest in the correctness of the Helmholtz theory.
Yet another obstacle stands in the way of the Bates method. Results are usually slow in coming and require of the student a good deal of application, even faith. It is so easy to go for the instant solution that few people give the method a fair chance. The person who has improved his or her vision is such a rarity that few opticians will have encountered any evidence that the method works. Those cases that have come to light have certainly been explained as examples of anomalous but spontaneous improvement which would have happened anyway.
The final obstacle to acceptance of the method is the curious nature of refractive errors and the perpetuating effect that glasses have on them. Glasses tend to fix and make permanent errors that would otherwise, in time, correct themselves. The longer glasses are worn, the more intransigent the errors become, and the less believable it becomes that they could ever be cured.
And yet, despite all these difficulties, the method persists. It enjoyed special popularity in the 1930s and 1940s, particularly after its enthusiastic endorsement by the writer Aldous Huxley, whose book on the method, The Art of Seeing (Chatto & Windus, 1943), has rarely been out of print since. There have been other books too, of varying quality. In one of the better ones, published in 1957, the Bates teacher C. A. Hackett analyses the results of 10 years’ work in which she treated 2180 cases of refractive error. Of these, over 75 per cent achieved lasting improvement, of whom about 45 per cent (over a third of all students) were able to do without their glasses entirely.
Besides the thousands of people who have derived benefit from teaching, there are presumably many who have achieved some success working alone. As Huxley points out, a book of instruction is no substitute for a good teacher, but in the absence of a teacher a book of instruction is better than nothing. It is my hope that I have presented in the following chapters an exposition which is clear, understandable, and designed to bring the wonderful benefits of the Bates method to all who care about their eyesight and are dissatisfied with present forms of treatment. It is also my hope — even conviction — that future generations will regard the wholesale dispensing of glasses as yet another pitiable example of a misguided fashion in medicine, as quaint as wholesale bloodletting or trepanning, and almost as barbarous.
* New York, 1919. Since reissued, in many editions, as Better Eyesight Without Glasses (for example, Souvenir Press, 1977; Granada Publishing, 1979).