“You may have been told that you need glasses, but in reality that is a lie. This is the phrase the Canadian “holistic master coach” and “influencer” says in one of his TikTok videos. Samantha Lotus. “There are mental, emotional, physical and even spiritual reasons why you can’t see…” he defends.
Although the most important reason, once we listen to what he says, has to be financial: the $11 course he’s selling, which is obviously absolutely worthless. Is it really time for glasses deniers? Here we are. The year 2023 is considered very psychotropic.
An epidemic that we don’t see well. For example, let’s talk about myopia, the most common vision problem on the planet. In the last half century, myopia has doubled in many areas of the world, such as the US and Europe. In Asia, for example, things go much further. It is estimated that only 10-20% of people were nearsighted in China about 50 years ago. 90% of young adults now have it. Looks like we’re talking about 96.5% of 19 year old males in Seoul.
What’s happening? It happens that the eyeballs grow excessively. The cause of myopia is not due to mental, emotional or spiritual reasons… it is because the eyeball grows more than necessary. Therefore, it arises during the school years and can worsen with growth.
But why? That is, what is the reason that suddenly so many eyeballs began to grow excessively? That’s what many researchers thought. Mainly because the speed with which this myopic epidemic appeared seems to rule out genetic change. As Seang Mei Saw of the National University of Singapore said, “we have to resort to the environmental factor.”
“You’ll go blind if you read so much…” For years it was thought that the main cause was the amount of time children spent studying or looking “up close” at things like books or screens… It is now known that a lack of dopamine due to lack of sunlight is the culprit.
And apparently it made sense. According to Eva van der Berg, “15-year-olds in Shanghai spend about 14 hours a week on homework, compared to 5 hours a week for British children and 6 hours for American children.” But the story was more complicated.
Let’s talk about light. In the late 2000s, researchers began conducting much larger studies and concluded that lack of outdoor exposure was behind it all. Although there is some debate, the current consensus is that intraocular dopamine controls the growth of the eyeball (and thus limits its deformation). The problem is that the production of this dopamine requires exposure to sunlight at optimal levels: apparently about three hours a day in environments with about 10,000 lumens.
And you can’t ‘train’ your vision? Be that as it may, it is clear that there are very complex problems behind the eyes. In fact, the idea that glasses are part of the problem is not new. As early as the 1920s, Bates strongly advocated opting for corrective exercises instead of wearing glasses. The role that “fatigue, stress or muscle tension” might play in these types of eye problems has also been studied in detail.
However, at the end of the 1990s, almost all lines of research on exercises for the treatment of myopia were terminated, because even if there were satisfactory partial results, they were very small and could not be systematized. Sight can be trained and can be successful in some contexts; but from what we know in the long run they don’t give great results.
And we’re talking about the best educational programs available. Not an $11 class that invites people stop wearing glasses to drive. Unfortunately, today only corrective lenses, surgery and some types of pharmacological treatment stand behind them. The rest is just pseudoscience.
The business of pseudoscience. Just before the pandemic, fake treatments for Alzheimer’s disease and other dementias were estimated to be worth about $3.2 billion. We don’t have reliable data on everything that drives pseudoscience, but everything seems to indicate that it’s a market that hasn’t stopped growing in recent decades.
That (and the billions of people connected to the internet) makes any nonsense about a niche market pointless. But in reality it is much more than that: it is a pit of confusion, irresponsibility and problems. The problem isn’t that an influencer who wants to abolish glasses goes viral, the problem is that these types of messages resonate very deeply with more people than we might think. Too deep.
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