DailyDirt: 20/20 Sight for Sore Eyes
from the urls-we-dig-up dept
Wearing glasses can be annoying, and some people find it so inconvenient that they’ll try almost anything to correct their vision without wearing spectacles. Technology comes to the rescue with a few other options. Caveat emptor!
- In the 1800s, the latest in contact lens technology was a piece of glass that stuck to your eye and blocked out the oxygen exchange to the cornea. Air permeable hydrogel polymers are much more comfortable. [url]
- Myopia is correlated with children who go outside for less than an hour per day and stay indoors with artificial lights? Say it slowly: correlation is not the same as causation… And are there a lot of myopic pets now, too? [url]
- Act now — you can perform LASIK at home on yourself in just four easy steps. That third step is really hard, actually. [url]
- To find more interesting stuff on health-related topics, check out what’s currently in the StumbleUpon archives. [url]
By the way, StumbleUpon can recommend some good Techdirt articles, too.
Filed Under: cornea, eyeglasses, lasik, lens, myopia
Comments on “DailyDirt: 20/20 Sight for Sore Eyes”
Heh, those Lasik directions are hilarious (direct link to the ridiculous comic)
It kind of feels like the opposite of a time I looked up how to make salt-and-vinegar popcorn seasoning. It was a belaboured, over-detailed ten-step recipe, and somewhere around step seven it said “add vinegar powder”
That recipe could have been one line long. “Step 1: Vinegar powder exists.”
Re:
And I can’t help but notice that asterisk in “Perform the painless procedure*”
*This statement has not been evaluated by the FDA.
I have to think the lasik bit is a joke. Has to be.
My mother used to yell at me for reading in the dark. Actually, I was reading by moonlight. And I had myopia and astigmatism long before I could read!
Re:
Heh. For those who are only skimming these links, yes, the Lasik@home website is fake. DO NOT TRY WITH REMAINING EYE.
Re: Re:
Nw u tell my, i can barley sea……………………….
Maybe because dogs have tapetum lucidum that concentrates light.
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=96414364
That study about how much light there is and eye problems could be true though and I’m inclined to believe in it, because it just makes sense.
People who worked in mines develop eye problems, people who works in aircontrol also develop the same thing, also there is the outdoor thing and one of the biggest causes of eye problems is vascular problems which are higher in people who expend most of their time inside.
Quote:
Source: http://www.geekosystem.com/chilean-miners-what-next/
Eyes do adapt to the quantity of light they receive daily, so is not that far-fetched to assume that less light could mean less need for perfect vision on the body for some reason, also there are at least 3 studies pointing to the same thing so there is something about quantity of light and eye sight, or could be that outside people exercise more and have better cardio since a lot of eye problems develop because of vascular problems.
Re:
Nicedoggy,
I’m just skeptical that there mechanism for the development of myopia hasn’t really been explained. The correlation could, as you point out, mean that people with better exercise habits have better vision — and it might not have anything to do with the amount of sunlight necessarily….
Re:
It’s a weird joke, though, since nothing other than the instructions actually seems jokey!
I guess we will need to wait until they explore the subject a bit more for them to find the answer.
Maybe the sun stimulates the production of some vitamin that is necessary for eye maintenance, maybe is about the body getting rid of some eye cells that don’t need to be used in low light conditions, maybe is about exercise, nobody knows yet, what they did observe is that people who get more sunshine have better eyesight for some unknown reason.
But since it is still an unknown, it may not hurt to spend more time outside or under brighter lights.
Re:
Well, it’s not even clear that sunshine was the only factor that they controlled for — the sunshine group was in Australia and the indoor group was in Singapore. Maybe Singapore emits myopia-causing radiation…? 😛
Re:
Or lack or radiation 🙂
Re:
Or lack off an understanding of ethic idiosyncrasies on the part of the researchers.
http://www.rxpgnews.com/asian-health/South-Asians-more-prone-to-heart-attacks-than-whites_408868.shtml
Re:
Myopia can have many causes, actually, and most scientist are still trying to tweak them all out.
Firstly, there’s genetics. If both your parents wear glasses, the chances that you will wear glasses can be in excess of 90%. They’re still trying to detect which genes are responsible but last I looked there were some 20 loci of interest.
Then there’s the environment. The study hasn’t been released so I can’t talk about it, but light quality does play a role; light outdoors is ‘better’ than indoor lighting.
Re:
Just to be clear, the “or’s” are my way of agreeing with you that is not clear that light or sunlight was the only factor.
But it could be.
hehe, this made me laugh in the lasik at home link:
“The whole procedure takes only a few minutes and is virtually painless.*”
Re:
Just wanted to point out that the 2parent 90% stat by itself does not imply anything about genes any more than having 2 parents be Christians and the child be Christian as well a high percent of the time has to do with genes.
Being surrounded by less-well-lit-than-evolved-for objects in closer-than-evolved-for proximity, just as your body is developing, is correlated with short-sightedness… I thought that research had established this years ago?
Correlation/causation aside, it’s certainly not much of a stretch of the imagination. Next you’ll be telling me that the reason I’m the size of a small car is because I eat 7000 calories of refined sugar a day.
FWIW
I think being inside hurts in 2 ways. One is that you don’t focus on far away items that frequently (don’t exercise). Two, the indoor light does not have the save range of frequencies, so being indoor a lot conditions your eyes to focus a narrow range of frequencies (different frequencies imply different focal points).
Since I was at least in high school (many years ago), I have noticed that being indoors (eg, taking exams) blurs my far-away vision and have always made an effort to try to look outside or focus on far-away items when I have been looking at near things inside for too long. It’s important to relax the eyes as well. I have very acceptable eyesight, but variations at time seem to confirm that it’s an exercise/maintenance ongoing battle. [When younger I partly had lazy eye (if I closed my left eye, it took a moment to get focus on my right), but this too mostly left with exercise.] Exercise does not mean tiring your eyes. You want to remain as relaxed as possible, but you want to make sure you can focus on demand with either eye. And (to test/exercise focus) instead of closing one eye at a time by closing your eyelid, consider keeping both open and simply moving your hand alternatively to block the sight of either eye.
As for vision quality, we have an ability to experience visuals richly or to almost ignore the visual image (same with hearing). This is a normal adaptation that allows you to concentrate to block or filter out most of the signals amid lots of visual information. This effect of who much information you accept plays a role in hurting (or not) your eyesight when applied under different light conditions (one reason to beware of reading in the dark vs just being in the dark)… at least that is what my eye experiences suggest to me.
So keep your eyes relaxed and feed them a variable cornucopia.
Other habits: I try to avoid looking at bright things in overall darkness for any prolonged time period (and this includes looking at the sun period).
FWIW
The discussion above is a pseudo-science, yet this that I attempted to describe is what I have followed for many years and appears to work for me.