Everyone is the best doctor for himself.
—Hippocrates
Natural healing of refractive errors occurs through education and informing people of their personal responsibility for their own health. More importance should be given to prevention rather than treatment.
Yet, any disease is viewed as something that happens beyond your will, despite preventive medicine and simple rules of living (correct diet, physical training, suitable vitamins, stress lessening) that could bring about not only the decrease of psychosomatic disease (like refractive errors) but also increasing the level of personal well-being and living standards. Thus, health does not mean absence of disease, but a state of complete well-being concerning all personal aspects (emotional, mental, bodily). Such health conditions would lead to a higher levels of well-being and “being,” including more creativity and more easily dealing with your environment.
All the benefits of a holistic treatment go far beyond symptom relief. After eliminating the causes of imbalance and having rehabilitated the organ or physiological system and returning to the initial level of efficiency (visual training in this case), a person feels as if he were reborn—with a new awareness and perception of himself and the entire world. In this case, “knowledge is power”—the power of influencing your own health and well-being by your lifestyle.
Each of us should be aware that it is up to us to motivate ourselves to develop healthy lifestyles, and that neither a pill nor a pair of glasses is enough to protect a person from disease. A new medicine, which isn’t based only on healing symptoms but foresees a global healing of the entire person and informs her of her ability to be responsible for her own health, will lead to a new society: not only a more healthy society from a bodily point of view but also a more creative, healthy, and sane society from any point of view.
For how long have the traditional branches of medicine been ignoring the obvious causes of myopia? These branches are still supposed to treat myopia, which is reaching epidemic proportions—indeed becoming a social disaster. For how long will we be prescribed contact lenses without them making a difference, nor our doctors informing us about intervening by ourselves?
For how long will we, our children, and our grandchildren be victims of ignorance on this issue? Modern society could have correct statements on refractive errors if politicians or leaders in health care intervened. Maybe, such revolution in the optic industry could be born, informing and awakening every single person who is interested in really treating his or her own sight.
The project of informing people of their power and the possibilities of preventing or, at least, decreasing the spread of myopia, should contain the following phases:
• Informative campaigns by competent health bodies (commercials, magazines, special TV broadcasts)
• Distribution of brochures with necessary information
• Financing of scientific works on the natural treatment of refractive errors, including the works aimed at establishing standard procedures for each level of refractive error (large samples are lacking now; so it’s impossible to set up and precisely standardize all the parameters for treating each group of people or level of vision defect)
• Establishing specialized centers (for preventive work and treatment)
• Encouraging prescription and the use of positive (plus) lenses for myopes, subsidizing the patients for free
Sometimes you see on TV or in banner headlines, glossy magazines, or advertisements: “March—Sight Preservation Month—Come in for a Free Examination.” It would be completely okay if the goal were to check out myopia. The problem develops when myopes with very low myopia (–0.25 or –0.50) are attracted by the advertisement and come to get their vision checked. They are immediately given “part-time” or “leisure” glasses to wear usually when watching TV or whenever they want to relax.
The result of this excessive sales pitch is that the myope, who could restore his normal refractive state quite easily at this threshold level through a functional rehabilitation program (learning the rules of sight hygiene, lessening the conditions of chronic stress, wearing positive lenses that could, rightly, be called “leisure” and “part-time glasses,” or through short treatment with myopic defocus) is condemned to wearing “correcting” negative lenses whose dioptric power must be increased from time to time.
• The health care culture typically does not deal with the issue of a patient who wants to be released from his symptom immediately without listening to the message his disease is “sending” him.
• We must open our eyes, listen to our disease, hear its message, and believe in our own power in healing our bodies, being led by treatments that are aimed at eliminating the causes of a problem and not just its symptoms.
Even the cinema was exploited by “booster commercials” on Sight Preservation Month and when the Harry Potter book series came out. Who was the star in the commercial on Sight Preservation Month? A boy wearing the same glasses as Harry Potter’s.
Try to imagine what kind of subliminal, unnoticed message could pass through innocent and naive children’s and unaware parents’ minds: a “booster” to check their sight together with instinctive childish emulation of Harry Potter’s spectacled look. Think it over folks … and please open your eyes.
If you are a personal trainer, you can reveal all the secrets and the best techniques on athletic performance and muscular mass increasing to your client, but it’s up to her to believe and trust in your instructions and suggestions and to apply the techniques in doing the exercises.
She will be discouraged many times and then she’ll need trust and perseverance: it’s like walking in the darkness and moving toward the light—we have been told about how to do it, but we are unable even to imagine it.
As it has always been, only courageous people win: those who are endowed with great willpower and courage, perseverance, trust, and above all, who are ready to work hard to reach an important target within reason, logic, and facts. These people aren’t satisfied with glib shortcuts, but go further, aware that they can get almost everything they wish in life if they understand the fundamental concept that the natural eye adapts its focal state to its visual environment.