In 1952, Aldous Huxley stood up at a Hollywood banquet and read his speech without glasses. It was the best advertisement natural vision ever had. An inflammation of the cornea at 16 had left him nearly blind, with one eye that could only tell light from dark. In 1939 he took lessons in the Bates method of eye training, and three years later he published The Art of Seeing, in which he wrote that within a couple of months he was reading without spectacles.
Then he faltered. He had learned the speech by heart, and when his memory slipped he brought the paper closer and closer to his face. At an inch away he still could not read it, and he had to fish a magnifying glass out of his pocket. Memory is a fine thing. It is not eyesight. Bennett Cerf, who told the story, called it "an agonizing moment".
Huxley was not a fraud. He answered that he had never claimed to read "except under very good conditions", and one critic had already suggested that he had "learned how to use what he has to better advantage". That is the honest version of natural vision improvement, and it is worth having. It is just not what is usually sold.
You may be the reader the sellers have in mind: 45 and refusing reading glasses, or at a screen all day with blurry eyes and a headache by evening, or a grandparent squinting to make out faces. A whole market is waiting for you, with courses, drops, lasers, gadgets, special lenses for your children and a shelf of pills. Some of it works. Some of it is dangerous. No shortcuts, no magic bullets and no secret: here is what each eye fix does, from eye exercises to laser surgery.
Ahead: what training can and cannot change, and why the drills seem to work, the man who called glasses crutches and told his followers to look at the sun, the mail-order course and the complaint against it, the court case against Huxley's teacher, the course a court stopped, the drops that replace reading glasses for a few hours, the yellow glasses sold for night driving, what laser surgery leaves behind and the operation that does give sight back, four ways to slow a child's short sight and the safety limit one of them crosses, red light for older eyes, why eye drills do not treat dyslexia, the jam the pilots never needed, what the thyroid does to the eyes, the two colours in the whites that mean something, what 20/20 means, and how to measure your own eyes at home.
What training can change
Why Your Eyes Are Getting Worse (And How to Improve Vision Naturally), linked below, has the long version. The short one: no exercise changes the shape of the eye, so no exercise changes a prescription. Palming, shifting focus between near and far, and deliberate blinking rest tired eyes, which is worth doing and costs nothing. One kind of eye training has a test behind it, for children whose eyes struggle to turn inwards together for close work, and the same article has the result.
So why do people who do the drills sometimes read further down the chart? When the evidence on visual training was reviewed in 2004, no objective benefit turned up, and the gains some people saw were put down to four things: getting better at interpreting a blurred image, mood and motivation, the tear film briefly acting like a contact lens, and a smaller pupil working like a pinhole. The eye stayed the same. The reading of it changed.
Everything else in this article is about the things that cost money.
Bates and the sun
William Bates self-published his book, The Cure of Imperfect Sight by Treatment Without Glasses, in 1920. It rests on the idea that strain pulls the eye out of shape and relaxation lets it return. No training has been shown to change the eye's focusing power, and his method's most dangerous part was "sunning". Bates told his followers to look at the sun and called any ill effects "always temporary". The retina did not get a vote. Reviewing the record in 1967, the British Medical Journal put it plainly: he "advocated prolonged sun-gazing as the treatment of myopia, with disastrous results". Editions published after his death dropped the advice to let the sun shine on open eyes.
Bates had a name for glasses: "eye crutches". He told his followers to throw them away, believing the eyes strained against the correction. When 94 short-sighted children aged 9 to 14 were deliberately given glasses slightly too weak for two years, their short sight progressed faster than in children wearing the full correction. Throwing glasses away is also a hazard at the wheel: James Randi told how his father, soon after giving up his, wrecked his car.
Sun-gazing is still taught, usually at sunrise or sunset, sometimes as a spiritual practice. Direct sunlight can burn the retina, an injury known as solar retinopathy, and it adds to the risk of cataracts and blindness. The harm to the retina can be permanent. An eclipse is the worst time of all: the dimmer light opens the pupils wide and lets more of the damaging rays in. Even on closed eyes, direct sun on the lids risks skin cancer.
Daylight is a different matter. Why Your Eyes Are Getting Worse has why time outdoors protects children's eyes, and why a hat suits the lens. Spend time outside under a wide brim such as , and never look at the sun itself.
Bates was selling from the start. In 1917 he teamed up with Bernarr Macfadden on a mail-order "New Course of Eye Training", heavily advertised in Macfadden's magazine Physical Culture and later criticised as dangerous quackery. In 1929 the Federal Trade Commission lodged a complaint against Bates for advertising "falsely or misleadingly". The sales pitch has aged better than the science.
His ideas outlived him. Huxley's own teacher, Margaret Corbett, held that "vision is nine-tenths mental". In 1940 she was charged in California with treating eyes without a licence. Her students testified that she had let them throw away their glasses, she was found not guilty, and a bill to require a licence for such teaching followed and was rejected.
The "See Clearly Method", a heavily advertised home course built on palming and light therapy adapted from Bates, had its sales halted by a court order in November 2006 over dishonest marketing. The exercises were mostly harmless. The promises were the problem.
After 40
Reading glasses are not a failure of willpower. The lens inside the eye stiffens with age, and from the early 40s close focus drifts out of reach. Worldwide, 826 million people have near vision limited by it. In high-income regions under 10% of them go without correction, and in parts of sub-Saharan Africa over 80% do. A cheap pair of readers is one of the best-value health purchases there is.
The drops. In 2021 the US regulator approved eye drops for reading. They contain pilocarpine, which shrinks the pupil, and a small pupil sharpens close vision the way a pinhole does. In the main test, 323 people aged 40 to 55 used the drop or a dummy drop daily for a month. Three hours after the drop, 31% could read three more lines on a near chart, against 8% on the dummy. The effect lasts hours, not for good. The side effects include headache, dimmer vision in poor light, which matters for night driving, and, rarely, a detached retina. That is a lot of chemistry to avoid a pair of glasses.
Pinhole glasses. The black plastic glasses full of tiny holes work on the same principle. Each hole lets through a narrow beam, so the image on the retina is sharper, while you wear them. They also make the world darker and cut what you see at the edges, so they are not for driving, and nothing carries over when you take them off. You have bought a colander for your face.
Night-driving glasses. Yellow lenses are sold to cut the glare of oncoming headlights and brighten the road at night. When 22 drivers in a night-driving simulator tried three commercial pairs against clear lenses, with and without oncoming glare, the yellow lenses did not help them spot a pedestrian any sooner, in any condition. A tint takes light away. At night there is none to spare.
Surgery
The real story of laser eye surgery is more useful than the horror version.
The US regulator ran its own surveys of LASIK patients, 262 Navy personnel and 312 civilians, asked before surgery and after. Three months on, 43% and 46% reported a visual symptom they had not had before: glare, halos, starbursts or double images. Of those with no dry-eye symptoms beforehand, about 28% had them at three months. And only 1 to 4% were dissatisfied with their vision, and 1 to 2% with the surgery.
Morris Waxler, a former official of the regulator who had been involved in approving LASIK, later turned against it, and in 2010 he claimed a failure rate above 50%. The surgeons' society answered that his information was full of false statements. The truth sits somewhere between the brochure and the campaign. Take both halves. Satisfaction runs high. Nearly half notice something new, especially at night, and dry eyes are common in the first months. Go in expecting both.
One operation does what the old version promised. A cataract, the clouding of the lens that comes with age, is treated by replacing the lens, usually on the same day and under local anaesthetic, and well over 90% of the operations restore useful vision. Real eye recovery exists. It happens in an operating theatre.
Children's short sight
This is where the market has the most to offer, and the most to answer for.
Start with what is free. Fascinating Ways the Summer Solstice Can Boost Your Health and Happiness has the twelve primary schools in Guangzhou: where one 40-minute outdoor class was added to each school day, 30% of the pupils had become short-sighted three years later, against 40% in the schools without it.
Then come the paid options.
Special lenses. Spectacle lenses with a ring of tiny segments that blur the edge of the image in a particular way were tested on 183 children aged 8 to 13. Over two years, short sight progressed 52% more slowly than in ordinary lenses.
Overnight lenses. Hard contact lenses worn at night reshape the front of the eye, so the child sees clearly through the day without glasses. In 102 children aged 6 to 10, they slowed the growth of the eye by 43% over two years. The catch is infection. Children wearing them had about 14 serious eye infections per 10,000 years of wear, and in that count neither infected child lost any sight. A small risk, taken every night.
Atropine drops. Low-strength atropine drops slowed short sight over five years in children aged 4 to 12, with the strongest of the three weak strengths working best. But when treatment was stopped in the third year, 88% of the children needed to start again. The drops hold the eye while they are used. They are a commitment, not a cure.
Red light. A desktop device that shines red light into the eyes for three minutes, twice a day, five days a week, slowed the growth of the eyeball over a year in 264 children: 0.13 millimetres against 0.38. Then two of these devices were measured. For both, three minutes of looking approached or went past the safe exposure limit for the retina. A child's retina is not the place to find out which side of that line a device falls on.
Short sight in a child is worth having assessed, and the length of the eye can be measured and watched. The outdoor class costs nothing.
Red light for older eyes
Red light has a second career, in ageing eyes. When people of different ages looked into deep red light at 670 nanometres, those around 40 and over saw colours more sharply on the blue side of the spectrum and saw better in dim light. In younger people nothing changed. The idea is that the light helps the energy factories in the retina's cells, which wear down with age. Why Your Eyes Are Getting Worse has the follow-up with a single morning session, and why the numbers are still too small to buy a device on. It is a finding to watch.
Eye drills and reading
The old version of this article had a page of drills: a grid of numbers on the wall, a metronome, a string with coloured beads, figure eights traced with the eyes. They come from vision therapy, and one of them, the bead string, is a genuine tool for training the eyes to turn in together. For that one problem, Why Your Eyes Are Getting Worse has the test that worked. Clinics that teach such drills provide accountability and structure, and that is worth something.
The trouble starts when the drills are sold for reading problems. A 2011 review of the evidence concluded that children with dyslexia have the same visual function and eye health as other children, and that eye-muscle exercises, pursuit and tracking drills, coloured lenses and "training" glasses do not treat learning disabilities. Dyslexia is a language problem, taught around rather than trained out of the eyes. 7 Benefits of Reading for Your Mind and Life has what it is, and that it can be assessed at any age.
The bottles
The old version carried a supplement stack a dozen bottles long, with an amount for each. Little of it has anything to show for vision.
Bilberry. The legend says RAF pilots ate bilberry jam to see at night, and even the old version admitted it may be folklore. It is. The jam was innocent. It just was not radar. Of 12 tests against a dummy, the four most recent and most rigorous were all negative, and the claim that bilberry improves normal night vision has no support. It is the jam version of the carrot story, which Why Your Eyes Are Getting Worse traces to wartime radar.
The eye vitamins. The famous formula has a real result, for a particular eye at a particular stage of macular degeneration, and nothing to show for healthy eyes. Why Your Eyes Are Getting Worse has who it is for, and Copper and Your Health: Too Little, Too Much, and Why has why copper is in it.
Fish oil for dry eyes. The same article has the test in which it did no better than olive oil.
Food. The macula's protective pigment is built from food, and the eggs that raised it are in there too. Eggs, liver and oily fish carry more for the eye than anything in the stack, and a tin of is the easiest of them to keep in the cupboard.
The body behind the eyes
The old version was right that the eyes reflect the rest of the body. It picked the wrong examples.
The thyroid. Puffy eyelids, eyes that seem to bulge, a gritty feeling and double vision can be thyroid eye disease, which comes with the overactive thyroid of Graves' disease. Smoking raises the chance of it 7.7-fold, and stopping is the first step. In 159 people with mild disease, six months of selenium improved their quality of life and slowed the disease against a dummy pill. Fish, meat, eggs and Brazil nuts are the food sources. Eyes that start to bulge or see double need checking.
The colour of the eye. What Your Eyes, Tongue, Nails, Skin, and Breath Are Telling You About Your Health, linked below, has the two colours in the whites of the eyes that hold. Yellow is jaundice, a sign of liver trouble that needs help the same day. A blue tinge is the surprise: among 169 hospital patients, it showed up in 87% of those with iron-deficiency anaemia and in 5% of those without. The same article has the soft yellow patches on the eyelids that went with 48% more heart attacks, and how iridologists did when they tried to read illness from the iris.
Metals. The old version suggested a hair test for metals building up in the eyes. The Quiet Signals of Mineral Deficiency has what happened when one person's hair was sent to six laboratories. It came back as six different people.
Measure, do not guess
The best advice in the old version was to measure. Feeling that your eyes are better is the weakest evidence there is. Huxley felt it too.
A chart on the wall. Print a standard letter chart, or buy a ready-made one such as , which comes with a cover for the other eye. Hang it at eye level 20 feet away in good light, and read it with each eye separately, the other one covered. Write down the smallest line you can read. Do it once a week at the same time of day, and watch the trend over months, not the swings from day to day.
The chart is older than it looks. Herman Snellen drew it in 1862, and its famous 20/20 line is the smallest one a normal eye reads at 20 feet. If your best line is 20/40, you need to stand at 20 feet to read what a normal eye reads at 40. And 20/20 is a standard, not a ceiling: the best eyes read further down, and the last lines of the chart are 20/15, 20/13 and 20/10.
A phone. A phone can do the same job. One phone test, Peek Acuity, was checked against standard charts in 300 adults in rural Kenya. It agreed well with them and took 77 seconds.
A grid. The Amsler grid, a square of lines with a dot in the middle, has been used since 1945 to watch the macula, the centre of the retina. Cover one eye and look at the dot. Wavy, bent or missing lines in the middle are a reason to get checked soon.
The edges. Look straight ahead, stretch your arms out to the sides and wiggle your fingers, then bring them forward until you see the movement. It is crude, but a change from last month means something.
The journal. Note what makes the numbers worse. Short sleep, a dry room and a long day at the screen usually do.
Why Your Eyes Are Getting Worse has the signs that need a check the same day.
Using what you have
Huxley never got normal vision back. What he got was a way to use the eyes he had, in good light, with less strain, and a magnifying glass in his pocket for the rest. That is a fair description of what the honest end of natural vision offers: rest, daylight, good food, and measuring instead of hoping. The rest of the market sells either a real treatment with real trade-offs, or nothing at all.
This week, test each eye at home and write down the smallest line you can read.
Wondering why your eyes keep getting worse? Why Your Eyes Are Getting Worse (And How to Improve Vision Naturally) — what screens, daylight and food do to your eyes, and what helps with each.
Curious what else your face gives away? What Your Eyes, Tongue, Nails, Skin, and Breath Are Telling You About Your Health — which signs on the surface of the body mean something, and who can read them.
Know someone about to spend money on their eyes? Send them this. A few of the fixes work, and the best test costs nothing.
Disclaimer: This article is general information. For advice about your own health, talk to a qualified health professional. Flashes, a sudden shower of floaters, a shadow across your vision or sudden blur need checking the same day.
Affiliate Disclosure: This article contains affiliate links. As an Amazon Associate, All For Life earns from qualifying purchases, at no extra cost to you. We only link to products we would recommend without the commission.
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