Hacker News Reader

Comment by retrac | Hacker News Reader

It's making a mountain out of a molehill. Yes, there's some evidence that very rigorous, regular eye exercises can help delay or even slightly reverse myopia. Slightly. If you give yourself a headache for like an hour a day, every day. And the effect goes away when you stop exercising.

This is something that has been studied pretty extensively. If it was actually a cure, it'd have been well-proven by now, and we'd all be doing it.

You really should exercise your eyes once in a while if you're staring at a screen all day, though.

View on HN

> This is something that has been studied pretty extensively. If it was actually a cure, it'd have been well-proven by now, and we'd all be doing it.

Untrue and faulty reasoning. It may have been studied extensively on biased populations, or the research may not have been funded adequately. Anyways, this is part of the "myopia is purely genetic" zeitgeist which is shoved down all of our throats in the west. Meanwhile, studies from Taiwan, Japan, and Korea show that myopia truly has an environmental component to it, e.g. childhood eyestrain and video games.

One may argue that could be because East Asian genetics are different from those of Europeans. I can't say exactly why, but I will say that the mainstream "myopia can't be cured/prevented" rhetoric has been extremely harmful for approximately 2 billion people on this planet.

Urban schools in China and Taiwan used to mandate daily eye exercises in classrooms. There was no effect. It wasn't until Taiwan started requiring more outside time for children that they were able to reverse the myopia trend.

To add to your point, https://www.cnn.com/2015/04/05/asia/myopia-east-asia/index.h...

In addition, wasn't there a study that found Australia children of Asian descent don't follow the same trend of myopia? IIRC, the researchers found that Australian children tend to spend a lot more time outside and get more natural sunlight. I wish I could find the original article.

Agreed. I surveyed the existing medical literature on the topic in about 2018 (or was it 2017?) and conclusion was that it is still a very active area of research with a lot of controversy.

Anecdotally, I have a low-grade myopia which gets observably worse after a lot of near work or sitting the whole day in front of a computer. I can pretty consistently reverse through the use of print pushing and use of anti-corrective lenses (basically forcing myself to look at a slightly out-of-focus image each day). It also consistently worsens when I stop doing it, especially when I stop spending time outside.

Slightly off topic, but how do you go about surveying the literature on a particular topic, say myopia or acne.?

A good way is to search for articles with "TOPIC" and "review" in the name on e.g. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/ or using a tool like https://inciteful.xyz/ (which was featured on HN some days ago). NCBI has an option for filtering by type of article, which includes reviews and systematic reviews.

These kinds of articles will then list relevant results, citing other relevant papers so you can continue going deeper from there.

> If it was actually a cure, it'd have been well-proven by now, and we'd all be doing it.

You could say that for everything for which there was no treatment before and for which the problem is now considered solved with modern practice.

I think the argument is that this isn't some unknown new untested discovery but instead something well known and constantly studied with disappointing results.

> It's making a mountain out of a molehill.

I have a pair of glasses to sell you which can fix that...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com