Continues From last Week

Results are generally not as good in patients with very large refractive errors of any type — You should discuss your expectations with your doctor and realize that you may still require glasses or contacts after the surgery.

• For some farsighted patients, results may diminish with age — The level of improved vision you experience after surgery for farsightedness may decrease with age.

• Long-term data are not available — LASIK is a relatively new technology. Therefore, the long-term safety and effectiveness of LASIK surgery is not known.

Are you ready to give it a try? I would not recommend it.

And besides, remember I’m driven to find a natural, holistic approach for both of us. This certainly does not come close.

What about eye muscle exercises?

There are a number of programs available for improving vision that promotes correction through eye exercises.

Even though this approach is closer to the natural solution, strengthening, toning, and conditioning your six eye muscles to keep them in perfect working order is quite simply not the right answer.

Why is that?

Most people don’t understand that the primary reason you can’t see clearly is that your eye muscles have too much strain, tightness, and contraction. Exercises can’t correct this, and, in fact they can actually worsen your vision.

Eye muscle exercises could lead you further down the path of strain — the exact opposite of the direction you need to go to achieve true vision improvement.

What your eyes really need is to re-learn how to let go, to RELAX, and to somehow naturally reclaim the perfect unstrained vision that a young health child has.

You may temporarily improve your sight by exercise, but you cannot improve it to normal, and if the effort is allowed to become continuous, your sight will steadily deteriorate and may eventually be destroyed.

Very seldom is the impairment or destruction of your vision due to any fault in the construction of your eye. Of two equally good pairs of eyes one will retain perfect sight to the end of life, and the other will lose it in kindergarten simply because one looks at things without effort and the other does not.

An eye with normal sight never struggles to see it just happens effortlessly.

If for any reason, such as dim light, or the distance of the object, a normal eye cannot see a particular point, it shifts to another point.  A normal eye never tries to bring out the point by staring at it, as the abnormal eye with imperfect sight is constantly doing.

Whenever your eye tries to see, it at once ceases to have normal vision. You may look at the stars with normal vision, but if you try to count the stars in any particular constellation you will probably become myopic, because the attempt to do these things usually results in an effort to see.

It obviously requires a strain to fail to see at the distance because the eye at rest is adjusted for distant vision. If one does anything when one wants to see at the distance, one must do the wrong thing.

The shape of your eyeball cannot be altered during distant vision without strain. It is equally a strain to fail to see at close up because when your muscles respond to your mind’s desire they do it without strain.

Could it really be this simple?

Amazingly the answer is “Yes.”

Your mind is the source of all stress from outside sources brought to bear upon your eye. Every thought of effort in your mind, of whatever sort, transmits a motor impulse to your eye; and every such impulse causes a deviation from the normal in the shape of the eyeball and lessens the sensitiveness of the centre of sight.

If you want to have perfect vision, therefore, you must minimize stress in your mind. Mental strain of any kind always produces conscious or unconscious eyestrain and if the strain takes the form of an effort to see, an error of refraction is always produced.

Mental strain may produce many different kinds of eyestrain. While there are many types of strains, there is only one cure for all of them, namely, relaxation.

The health of your eye depends upon your blood, and circulation is very largely influenced by your thoughts. When your thoughts are normal — that is, not attended by any excitement or strain — the circulation in your brain is normal, the supply of blood to your optic nerve and your visual centres are normal, and your vision is perfect.

When your thoughts are abnormal your circulation is disturbed, the supply of blood to your optic nerve and visual centres is altered, and your vision lowered.

You can consciously think thoughts that disturb your circulation and lower your visual power; you can also consciously think thoughts that will restore normal circulation and thereby improve not only all errors of refraction, but many other abnormal conditions of your eyes.

You cannot by any amount of effort make yourself see, but by learning to control your thoughts you can accomplish that end indirectly.

When a disturbing thought is replaced by one that relaxes, your squint disappears, the double vision and the errors of refraction are corrected and this is as true of abnormalities of long standing as of those produced voluntarily.

No matter how long your eyes have been impaired an improvement is accomplished just as soon as you are able to secure mental control. The cause of any error of refraction, of a squint, or of any other functional disturbance of your eye is simply a thought — a wrong thought — and the improvement is as quick as the thought that relaxes.

In a fraction of a second the highest degrees of refractive error may be corrected, a squint may disappear, or the blindness of amblyopia may be relieved.

If the relaxation is only momentary, the correction is momentary. When it becomes permanent, the correction is permanent.

This relaxation cannot, however, be obtained by any sort of effort. It is fundamental that you understand this; for so long as you think, consciously or unconsciously, that relief from strain may be obtained by another strain your improvement will be delayed.

That is why RELAXING your eyes and addressing the stressors that contribute to the stress are the key to help you recover your vision.

Why making sound dietary and emotional choices are key vision enhancers

Temporary conditions may contribute to the strain to see that result in poor eyesight, but its foundation lies in wrong habits of your thought.

Very seldom is the impairment or destruction of vision due to any fault in the construction of your eye. Of two equally good pairs of eyes one will retain perfect sight to the end of life, and the other will lose it in kindergarten simply because one looks at things without effort and the other does not.

In addition to optimizing blood flow by relaxing and controlling your thoughts you can also directly improve the nutrients your central nervous system and eye receive by focusing on high quality nutrition.

Here are the dietary guidelines I follow to support eyesight:

• Eat plenty of foods containing lutein — spinach, broccoli, zucchini, peas,

• Increase your intake of omega-3s — krill oil is a great choice

• Eat nutritious raw egg yolks — they contain zeaxanthin and lutein

• Consume plenty of raw vegetables and fruits — particularly dark berries

• Avoid processed foods especially those containing trans fats

And now, for the rest of my cruise story…

The two words that helped improve my vision

Despite my own dedication to a healthy diet and getting plenty of sunlight, , I still needed to use glasses to read the small print on a menu.

That day back in 2005 on the Caribbean cruise, when I broke my glasses and met Dr. Larry Clapp, was a major turning point in my long search for natural vision improvement.

And the two words Dr. Clapp shared with me that day were: Bates Method.

The Bates Method is a 100 year old approach that has helped tens of thousands of people recover their vision naturally — including me!

Dr. Bates was in many ways a renegade just like me. He was a traditionally trained ophthalmologist at Cornell University. He practice for over thirty years and his experience with tens of thousands of patients showed him that there were serious flaws in the conventional views of eye science at the turn of the twentieth century.

Rather than use the conventional cumbersome and relatively inaccurate Snellen eye charts (which are still used today) he used a far more accurate retinoscope to assess his patient’s visual acuity.

The retinoscope is an instrument used to measure the refraction of the eye by throwing a beam of light into the pupil by reflection from a mirror, the light being either outside the instrument — above and behind the subject — or arranged within it by means of an electric battery.

For 30 years Dr. Bates used the retinoscope to examine under a wide variety of clinical settings the eyes of tens of thousands of school children, hundreds of infants and thousands of animals, including cats, dogs, rabbits, horses, cows, birds, turtles, reptiles and fish.

His persistent research allowed him to uncover some basic strategies in helping tens of thousands of people recover their vision without the use of glasses or surgery.

So Dr. Bates boldly told the entire eye community in the early 1900s that based on his observations over 30 years it was his belief that what they had been teaching for the last century was simply wrong and they were actually causing more harm than good.

His alternative approach was so effective and a threat to the traditional eye community, that leading eye specialists in the 1900s manipulated New York politicians into making it illegal. They simply could not tolerate the competition from his new approach.

And, interestingly, to this day the Bates Method for naturally recovering your vision remains illegal in the state of New York.

I learned a powerful secret from Dr. Clapp that day on the cruise.

Remarkably, 20 years after Dr. Clapp discovered these simple but powerful techniques of natural vision correction, his vision still remained perfectly clear — as were the others he’d shared the Bates Method with.

You see, Dr Bates was a radical pioneer far ahead of his time, even in today’s medical views. He was a maverick physician who dedicated his life to learning why people develop problems with their eyesight — problems like near sightedness, farsightedness, presbyopia, and astigmatism.

Sadly Dr. Clapp passed away a few years ago, but until his death he still didn’t need glasses, and he serves as a tremendous model that you can live a full natural life without ever requiring the use of reading glasses.

And now I’m ready to share this natural vision correction method with you.

Discover these 100 year old secrets

To discover the techniques and methods that helped me restore my own vision, I flew out to California to train with a leading instructor in this unique method.

It cost me thousands of dollars (and as you will soon see, something you won’t have to worry about). But it was more than worth the investment of my time and money to regain my vision without the use of glasses or contacts.

It flat-out worked — I virtually never use my reading glasses. About the only time I require them are under very low light settings, or to read very tiny print (3 point font) in poor light.  But given enough light I simply do not require the use of glasses anymore.

My own results impressed me so much and with all the in-depth research my team and I did on the history and success of the Bates Method — I decided to simplify this powerful natural vision improvement training for you.

Dr. Mercola has made significant milestones in his mission to bring people practical solutions to their health problems. A New York Times Best Selling Author, he was also voted the 2009 Ultimate Wellness Game Changer by the Huffington Post, and has been featured in TIME magazine, LA Times, CNN, Fox News, ABC News, Today Show, CBS’s Washington Unplugged with Sharyl  Attkisson, and other major media resources.

Continues NEXT WEEK