Myth: Doing Eye Exercises will delay the need for glasses.
Fact: Eye Exercises will not improve or preserve vision or reduce the need for glasses
Self-help programs of eye exercises that claim to reduce or eliminate your need for glasses and contacts have been around since the 1920s.
Research by AllAboutVision.com failed to uncover any studies showing that eye exercises can alter the eye’s basic anatomy significantly or eliminate presbyopia.
To better understand if eye exercises that promise “natural vision improvement” can actually reduce refractive errors, you need to consider the eye’s basic anatomy and how the eye refracts light.
Problems with how the eye is shaped typically contribute to focusing errors such as nearsightedness, farsightedness, and astigmatism. For example:
- When the eyeball is too short, you are farsighted and can’t focus on near objects because light rays entering your eye achieve a point of focus somewhere beyond your retina.
- When you are nearsighted and your eyeball is too long, light rays have too far to go and “fall short” of achieving a point of focus on your retina.
- When you have astigmatism, usually your cornea has an irregular shape. Sometimes, astigmatism results when your eye’s natural lens has an irregular shape. These irregularities cause light rays entering your eye to split into different points of focus, creating blurry vision.
- Another common vision problem, presbyopia, occurs with aging when your eye’s natural lens starts to lose elasticity and no longer can move properly to accommodate focus at multiple distances. This condition typically causes your near vision to start blurring, beginning at around age 40.
When you “exercise” your eyes, you move your eye muscles to create up-and-down, side-to-side or circular motion. You also “work” the muscles controlling back-and-forth movement of your eye’s natural lens, to help achieve sight at multiple distances.
So if you are considering an eye exercise program to improve your vision, ask yourself these questions:
- Will exercising your eyes change the basic shape of your eyeball, by making it longer or shorter?
- Will eye exercises alter the basic shape of your cornea, and change the angle of how light rays enter your eye to achieve focus? (For example, this is how LASIK works to correct common vision errors.)
- If you have astigmatism, will exercising your eyes somehow reshape your eye’s irregular surface?
- If you have presbyopia, will eye exercises restore your eye’s lens to its once youthful elasticity that has declined due to aging processes?
After evaluations of various studies involving programs of eye exercises, biofeedback, muscle relaxation, eye patching and eye massage, officials at the American Academy of Ophthalmology issued this statement in 2004:
“It is not clear if patients purchasing these programs for use at home outside of the controlled environment of a research study will have any improvement in their vision. No evidence was found that visual training has any effect on the progression of myopia. No evidence was found that visual training improves visual function for patients with hyperopia or astigmatism. No evidence was found that visual training improves vision lost through disease processes such as age-related macular degeneration, glaucoma, or diabetic retinopathy.”
So buyer beware of reckless claims and consider the credibility of sources. If you have any questions on the effectiveness and safety of any eye exercise programs please call the office and make an appointment at 505-884-8722
