our speaker today is Todd Becker and he's going to speak on myopia a modern yet reversible disease thank you it's great to be here uh how many of you wear glasses or contact lenses that's a pretty good percentage of the audience all right so we're going to be talking about your eyes today and I hope you you'll find the talk uh interesting but I'd like to start out with two pictures uh both of them feature myself and my daughter the first one on the left was on a merry gound at the San Francisco Zoo when she was about a year old and the one on the right was more recently and you might notice some differences between the picture well I beside the fact that my hair is gray uh I was wearing glasses and the one on the left about uh 20 years ago and so part of The Talk today is my story about uh what I did to learn about myopia and how I got rid of my glasses but the talk really has two parts the first part is going to be about the causes of myopia and you really have to start there if you're going to be effective in reversing myopia and the second half will be uh a technique that I've developed and it's similar to techniques that others have developed but it's my own particular Twist on it on how to use active focusing to reverse myopia the photograph there shows some girls in uh High School in Singapore in a language arts class using their iPads and you can see that all the girls in the class are wearing glasses and in some of the Asian countries like Singapore myopia is uh is very prevalent so first of all what is myopia well it's colloquially nearsightedness and what it is biologically is a refractor defect of the eye where when you're looking in the distance uh distant objects appear blurred because uh the images are focused in front of the retina rather than on the retina it's really a very common disorder probably the most common refractive uh era of the eye and it's becoming more prevalent and severe myopia can lead to macular degeneration cataracts eye floaters uh retinal detachment in serious cases so it's something to be concerned about now my talks about myopia but some of you are farsighted and have hyperopia it's the opposite condition uh I had to focus the talk so I chose myopia because it's more common but a lot of the principles here if you if you pay attention apply to hyperopia as well so question is uh is myopia caused genetically or is it environmental there's evidence on both sides uh for example twin studies and and and parent child studies show a higher correlation than you would get uh with fraternal twins or just by chance there's a number of gene mutations that have been identified like SC2 which is a has to do with copper metabolism which are implicated in severe myopia and there's wide variation between different ethnic groups so for example it's much higher in Asia you know 70 to 90% in some countries maybe a third of people in the US or uh or Europe have myopia and it's much less common in Africa on the other side there's a lot of environmental factors so for example there's been a large increase among Aboriginal peoples for example Eskimos once they were introduced to Western schooling there's a correlation between achievement level in school or academic level in myopia and there's some experimental demonstrations that uh defocus uh generated by close work is a cause of myopia and we'll be getting into that in some detail if you go back some of the early studies on myopia there's one from Holland in the 1880s looking at military recruits looking at the occupations of where people came from when they were coming into the army and if you looked at farmers and fishermen it was about 2 and a half% uh prevalence of myopia if you looked at leather workers who Ed their hands course work maybe about 5% hand workers who were doing fine work perhaps Jewelers it jumps up to 12% Merchants who were doing a lot of uh you know accounting work paperwork 15% and advanced students about a third so that was some indication that there might be a relationship between the kind of activity you're doing and the incidents of myopia if you look more recently myopia has really increased since 19 70 all right in all age groups and what this shows here are different age groups from youth to uh my age where the incidence and prevalence of myopia has almost doubled and the gray and black show the incidence of the more severe or Advanced types of myopia where you see particularly a large change uh so if you look also at Aboriginal peoples I think a good example is and this was a study done by Francis young in 1969 in Alaska uh if you look at the incidents by age group it's very interesting because in 1969 there had been a school in operation for about 30 or 40 years so those folks who were older than 40 had not had Western education and you can see there's virtually no incidents of myopia there whereas those had who had been introduced to Western schooling had in some cases more than 50 % incidents again some evidence of a an environmental Factor if you look at Germany there was a study done just recently uh where uh people who did not complete secondary or vocational education had maybe you know 20 30% or 20% myopia those who completed their secondary education it bumped up to maybe 35 and then those who completed University more than half of them had myopia and there's some Geographic uh distribution that indicates um countries where um particularly in Asia where there's more schooling even at Young ages like 7 to n we see that in uh Singapore for example 34% myopia whereas Nepal it's only 3% and that compares to a modest maybe seven or 8% in the US again in school children so uh there's another environmental factor which is Diet all right and uh there's some studies particularly by cordan showing that uh for example eating a lot of carbohydrates not surprisingly might induce higher incidents of myopia and it's been tied to uh hyper insula to excess carbohydrate intake to a deficiency of fish oil and essential fatty acids and to uh mineral deficiencies now cordain took the view that actually genetics were not that important because he was studying uh children in the islands of vatua who were in school 8 hours a day and yet they only had about um 2% myopia but you know as I'll argue later it's not genetics or environment but I think the two come together and if you if you think about it in terms of epigenetics or environment acting on the genes it's kind of like alcoholism right you can have a gene for predilection to alcoholism but if you're not exposed to alcohol you won't you won't have that condition well there was a study done by Douglas Frederick in 2002 showing that uh if you had the the genetic uh indicators for myopia and you engaged in practices myop genic practices like education near work uh you could get strong myopia more than two diopters uh whereas if you're not predisposed and you had those habits you you might get some milder myopia however if you had practices that were non-open basically Bally either a low level of Education or occupation that didn't involve a lot of near work uh there was either mild or no myopia it's very interesting paper so let's get into the biology you know H how can you explain this all right so I think it's important to start with uh an understanding of how the eye focus is light if you look at the eye it has this lens in it the crystallin lens which just as in a camera can change shape to focus uh light on the back of the retina where you perceive the image now when you're looking at distant objects and and most of the rays are coming in parallel the lens is fairly flat so there's not much focusing needed however when you're focusing close up the lens actually has to expand and and become more curved um and just like with a magnifying glass you'll tend to be able to focus the light now a healthy eye go back and forth between those two focusing States rather easily however what happens in uh in myopia it really is a process that develops in a couple of stages so first of all you as we saw in the previous diagram you have a thinned lens when you're looking at far objects and you have a thickened lens when you're looking at near objects if you spend a lot of time working on the computer or reading or looking at your smartphone after a while you'll the U when you're doing near work the lens will spasm and it will be much harder for it to thin out again when you look in the distance so now when you look in the distance rather than focusing on the retina you're focusing in front of the retina and you perceive a blurred image so this can be transient you know and this is what happens when you uh might be in grade school but if you if you're doing a lot of n work or you're looking at your smartphone all the time that spasm becomes more permanent and so you go to the optician and the optometrist and they fit you with minus lenses which are convex lenses and when you put those in front of the eye it sort of has the effect of making it look as if you're seeing things in focus when you're looking in the distance and all is well however there's a problem here because that distance correction now causes focusing behind the retina when you're looking up close and this induces a very interesting process and I'll get into the biology of it whereby the eye elongates and the axis of the eye gets longer all right and it has to do with a biological mechanism having to do with defocus now when the eye elongates uh all of a sudden the eye is longer this is fine when you're doing near work where you're spending most of the time however you you get the same problem as you did with pseudo in that you're now focusing in front of the retina and those images are out of focus so what do you do you go back to the optician and get a stronger prescription and the process repeats itself over and over and over again and this was my experience uh where I had to get stronger and stronger prescriptions in order to see and focus so there's a theory called the incremental retinal defocus Theory and this was uh developed veloped by hung and shiaa and there's some very interesting recent data in humans showing that if you actually fit a a person with a uh a minus lens right the axis of the eye will grow and here in just the course of an hour the length of the eye is increased by more than 5 millimeters which is significant because the eye is only 25 millimeters long on the other hand if you put a plus lens in front of the eye over the course of an hour it will shrink right by about 10 millimeters and if you just put a neutral lens on there's no change now this is a study in humans uh this is very recent a lot of the older data was in primates and in chicks but this is exciting because they now have tools using a a photometer where they can actually measure uh the length of the eye when you're focusing and this is I think pretty interesting proof of what's going on so what's actually happening is that uh when you're fitting the eye with this lens and you're focusing behind the retina uh there's a process by which there's a growth of scleral tissue and the scleral tissue grows in response some to some neuromodulators that are secreted when there's a defocus um it's it's actually quite interesting it's been experimentally demonstrated so these neur modulators increase the elasticity of the scleral tissue and allow the eye to elongate the same process by the way can happen in in hyperopia where you're focusing uh in the other direction and you can cause the eye to become shorter so let's see if we can put this into a practice can we take this learning and turn it into actually a method for reversing myopia I mean there you saw an experimental demonstration how actually putting a lens in front of the eye can change its shape so in this regard I'd like to touch on a a key principle that I write about in my blog getting stronger and that is hormesis hormesis is a beneficial response of an organism to a lowd dose stressor that's otherwise detrimental or lethal at high doses and it works by activating various defense or repair mechanisms and there's a lot of examples you might be familiar with for example exercise and immunization calorie restriction exposure to hot or cold these provoke an Adaptive response UV radiation phytonutrients formation calluses if you play the guitar go barefoot you get the growth of skin there and I will argue that active focusing is also uh analogous to U uh exercise in this respect exercise particularly weightlifting is a great example of hormesis right if you're lifting heavy objects you're causing uh these micro tears uh microt trauma to the muscle and you you get a super compensation as a result as long as you don't overdo it your muscles will grow back stronger the key is you've got to do training optimally at by working at the edge of failure if you overtrain you'll damage the muscle if you under Trin you don't get a response and this is sometimes called the specific adaptation to imposed demand or the said principle uh so how can we apply this to reversing myopia but first imagine that you walked into a gym and you wanted to get stronger and you applied the same model that a optometrist did now you go into the eye doctor and what they're giving you when they give you a pair of glasses or lenses is essentially a crutch right you want to have immediate satisfaction and see things Crystal Clarity right away you don't want to do any work well if you went into the gym uh and instead of working out they said here we're going to put an exoskeleton on you and this is not a joke the there's a defense contractor who's actually proposing this for soldiers who have to go on long you know hikes and training missions that you would wear this uh exoskeleton and as you move that would amplify your muscular strength and it would make life easier well what do you think would happen if you wore this exoskeleton all the time right probably the same thing that happens to astronauts in space their their muscles atrophy they get weaker and when they take off the exoskeleton the problem's even worse well my argument is this is exactly what you're doing when when you're wearing glasses you're weakening your eyes so let's talk about then how we can apply hormesis to make your eyes become less myopic well there's a few techniques first of all um there's uh print pushing and plus lenses which you use while you're reading secondly there's uh for distance there's the use of progressively weaker lenses or Fusion of ghosted images which I'll talk about so you first have to understand how myopic you are and the best way of doing this is to use a Snelling chart you're all familiar with this if you've gone to the DMV or if you've gone to the eye doctor it's a series of letters with different lines and you stand 20 feet back and see how far down you can read so if you could read down to uh line four there or line let's say line five the PEC FD you would have 2040 Snell and score which means you can see at 20 ft what normal person can see it 40 ft and if you can only read the e at the top well then you've got a problem but if you translate that into the prescription you'll get so if you look at that 20 40 person uh they they uh might get a prescription that's about 75 diopters which means they could see normal-sized text about 52 inches in front of them without glasses all right so you first have to know your strength now here's where the interesting thing comes in it if you really want to work on reversing your myopia you have to read without glasses if you have uh so I'd like to distinguish three different distances and this is my daughter acting as a model here in front of the computer so you're sitting at the computer or a book and you're reading take off your glasses now if you wear them and hold some printed matter in front of you all right hold it at a distance where you can see things just in focus and Pull It in that's D1 that's what I call the edge of focus now push it out just a little bit further until it just starts to blur you just see that beginning of blur and that's what I call the edge of blur and that is D2 push it back a little further away and it starts to become indistinct that's too far that's the edge of readability well this is analogous to when you go into the gy choosing the proper weight right you want to pick that weight that's putting you right at the edge of discomfort now what you want to do is uh if you're um go here is move back and forth between D1 and D2 while you're reading and just keep pushing it a little bit and you'll feel that it's a little bit discomfort a little bit uncomfortable but never painful and never difficult and so you'll be reading between D1 and D2 and do this for about 2 to 4 hours every day take a break every 15 to 30 minutes or so and eventually what you'll find is you can increase D1 and D2 you can push it a little bit further away maybe the second day you'll get another inch away all right keep keep doing this um you'll be surprised actually by how quickly it works once you get to 20 in away if you can see that you're in great shape now you need to use Plus lenses right so if your myopia is strong you don't need to use anything but if your myopia starts to get weaker now you use plus lenses so here's what you do if your correction is a little bit weaker uh if you need if you have a correction of like less than minus two diopters you go into the pharmacy and you'll see these racks with readers and you might try on the plus one or the plus 1.25 or the plus 1.5 pick a pick a uh pair so so that you can read comfortably at you know 15 to 20 in so now you're actually starting to handicap yourself this is like going for a run carrying weights right and you're going to get stronger faster this way uh you might buy several Pairs and as you get stronger and stronger you might be up to a plus two now you're going to find that as you look at the distance everything is starting to get clear and that's pretty exciting keep going and keep Che testing your snellin you know every week to see if you can read further and further down on those lines okay what do you do when you're not reading say you're going for a walk watching TV you're sitting in in a room like this and you want to improve maybe you're riding as a passenger in a car I wouldn't advise this when you're driving all right so what you do there is you get weaker lenses so let's suppose your prescription is for a minus three right so get a minus 2.5 now maybe your optometrist is cooperative and we we'll do that for you but if not go to uh online go to zeni optical.com put in your prescription and you have here some frames about $7 and with the lenses it might cost $20 order yourselves a few pairs of progressively weaker so if you're at minus three get a minus 2.5 get a min-2 get a minus 1.5 and then as you get better and better move down to the weaker lenses okay now now I'm going to talk about a technique which is really fun and very playful in the spirit of Daryl Edwards and this is a real story how did I actually discover this technique well I was vacationing and I left my glasses at home on the other side of the of the US so I was without glasses for two weeks and at first I was very frustrated I'd brought some good books to read and my eyes were all blurry so I went for a walk and said okay I'm just going to see what I can do without glasses what I noticed is that when I looked in the distance particularly at objects that had sharp contrast like the edge of a building or overhead telephone wires that I could see a crisp image and then I saw next to that a very faint secondary image and this is sometimes called diplopia or double vision it's not a serious problem unless it's in a single eye which then you should see your eye doctor but generally it's just a refractive issue when you're when your eyes are have mild myopia not very strong myopia you'll see these two images sometimes you'll see more than two and it's really just anra a refractive uh uh phenomenon but it's actually quite useful because the more you stare at this you'll find that one of those two images is darker than the other right and as you keep staring you'll find that one gets darker and the other gets lighter and fainter and eventually it fuses and this was very exciting Discovery For Me That by looking at distant objects particularly with high contrast I could start fusing the images so this was my method for active focusing and looking in the distance and the plus lenses for working at the computer okay so there's some some key questions here does the method really work how much time should I spend each day doing this how long before my vision improves and is this the same as the baates method well a couple facts first of all it worked for me and for really dozens of others and I write a blog getting stronger. org that's had over 1.3 million views uh there's two posts in particular that i' encourage you to look at that have to do with vision improvement uh one of them is called improve vision and throw away your glasses and then I have a forum where there's a thread called eyesight without glasses and these have you know over 100,000 views and also Al I'll show you some uh slides with references at the end of the talk uh and they'll be on my website if you're skeptical or if you want to follow up on the science behind this how much time should you spend at it um first of all you got to have the right mindset these are not exercises that you do like going to the gym these are activities you integrate into your daily activity while you're working at the computer while you're at work every day or while you're going for walks spend at least two to four hours print pushing without plus lenses if you have mild myop if you have strong myopia and with plus lenses if you have mild myopia and take breaks it's very important don't sit there looking at the screen all the time look in the distance look up close look look near look far um key Point again it should feel awkward but never painful if you do get red eye or strain stop take a few few days off try it again how long does this take to work that's the other question I always get again be patient it took years for your eyes to get into this Condition it's not going to change overnight how do you approach exercise going to the gym and diet you don't expect immediate results you've got to work at this however keep in mind that you're going to see clearly um and that's going to be exciting I mean the one thing I have to say here is that this was the most exciting thing for me to be able to take off my glasses and see everything in crisp detail to see Expressions to see the leaves on trees fine little you know branches to see little patterns in the in the sky that I'd never seen before if that doesn't motivate you I don't know what what can it's just incredibly liberating to be free of your glasses and not to have contact lenses so typically most people see some improvements within a few weeks and the rate of improvement is generally faster in the beginning uh it's common to see a sudden Improvement and then no change for a while and then a sudden Improvement but that's the way it works with going to the gym right or losing weight it's not a steady line but again the excitement comes at the end when you don't need glasses anymore is this the same as the Bates method well not really Bates had a theory that he you need to relax the eye and he had a a faulty idea of physiology he thought that focusing the eyes muscles had to do with uh muscles that surrounded the eye tensing or relaxing and that you were actually changing the shape of the eye we now know that's not the case it's the silary muscles and the Crystal changing the shape of the crystallin lens I mean he was probably right about uh eye strain and uh uh the fact that you need to relax however he only addressed really half the problem which is what I call pseudomyopia right that initial period where you're not being able to see and focus he really didn't address axial my myopia because he didn't know that the eye would get longer or shorter and unfortunately his methods of relaxation and distance viewing they're great right I think they're fantastic but they really don't do anything for those of us who are sitting at a computer all day right because you can only spend a certain amount of time looking in the distance and what we know from the incremental retinal defocus theory is that it's kind of the time averaged exposure to different focal lengths that's important so if you're going to be spending a lot of time with the computer you need a technique and that's where the print pushing idea comes right holding the piece of paper or the screen at that right distance not getting too close not relying on your lenses but working right at that threshold between focus and blur focus and blur it's a very tiny threshold and you can find it pretty easily all right so that's what bats didn't offer okay so I would like to summarize your eyes are adaptive organs just like your muscles just like your metabolism just like everything about you you've been reading closeup for years you've been working with smartphones those are a particular problem with kids right they're they're looking at their smartphone or their video game all the time and as a result your lenses are in Sp you need progressively stronger lens prescriptions to correct that problem but that only makes your eye get longer and your myopia worse so reverse the process do the opposite right use that same adaptability to reverse the process and use active Focus take time out from your busy routine look at distant objects move back when you read if you're sitting watching a TV program sit as far back as you can if you're in a lecture hall sit as far back as you can to see everything without your glasses um if your myopia is weak and your eyes are getting really good use plus lenses to accelerate the process right and when you take those plus lenses off you'll find wow everything is really crystal clear so stimulate your eyes it's very important play with your eyes have fun with this this is not a chore build it into your daily life make it a habit but make it a game when you're walking along a trail look at every little Branch right Trace those branches look at the Shadows see what you can make out right there's a this wonderful world around you you're not not noticing but a fraction of the details and it's just so stimulating to be able to do that without your glasses what I can tell you is the more you do this and the more disciplined you are about doing it the better your results will be um so anyway that's all I have to offer you today and um happy to take questions uh first before I take questions I just wanted to flash on here some references um on the epidemiology and on the biological mechanism right this will be on the video and you can take a snapshot and finally on on methods that you can use to improve your vision and some websites I particularly recommend uh uh the d'angelus book and the Severson book and Otis Brown really good uh methods in my site uh getting stronger. org or are you just kind of cured so just as you would uh when you're fit you go to the gym every so often right um I would say periodically I I have a pair of plus lenses if I'm reading a lot I'll pull them out and use them for a bit but not very much actually because what I tend to do is just sit back a little bit further from my screen and try to avoid the bad habits in the first place um with the screen being such a potentially negative um part of the environment um I noticed that the you know the your daughter was modeling in front of the screen is it better to try to train with books um and not look at screens um is there a certain volume of you know time to look at a screen um considering how much you said the the the smartphones and the computers are damaging our eyes yeah I think it's preferable to have a well-lit uh book in front of you would be ideal but sometimes you don't have that option so if you are doing computer work uh I don't see any real difference as long as you have good lighting um and uh you're healthy you can use a computer or a book thanks uh okay so it seems that in my family we run myopia my brother has two eyes that are around 21,000 so he just can't do anything without glasses I have have an unusual problem that this eyee is perfect and this eye is really myopic when when I go to the Snelling charts I can't read the biggest letter anymore but the problem is that I remember what it is so um so you so your two eyes are different very different and this is by the way very common it's called ambal Opia I have it too in fact I have one ey that's slightly farsighted one that's slightly nearsighted so here's what you do well right if you have the the two different eyes uh block one eye and work with the weaker eye because your stronger eye is going to dominate and do more work for you you can put a patch on your glasses you can just hold your hand like this or you can wink right wink from one eye to the other and it's awkward at first but your winking muscle gets stronger yeah because I have 2020 and 2400 so I find that it my problem is I can read right here and I can read right here and it's only like right here that's difficult because my eyes are not used to vying predominance and they don't like that um so I should probably read a lot right here so my eyes get used to seeing thre dimensionally would that be yeah but your eyes are so different I think you probably want to work your weaker eye first until it gets closer because it's much easier to do this method when your eyes are close so in my case it was you my left eye that was weaker and I spent a lot of time working that until the two were even so would you have have some advice for my brother who would probably have to be about this close to the computer before he could be at the edge of readability that's tough but that's where you start maybe his nose will get in the way yeah now that that's where you start one thing he can do is use weakened prescription so cut a few diopters off the prescription so that you're at a reasonable distance uh in this case it would be a minus prescription but just weaken the prescription and start there great thanks for someone with a really strong prescription if they go through this process are they going are they going to have to replace their glasses along the way because it can be pretty pricey yes and that's why I recommended this website zeni optical.com very inexpensive frames you know get several pairs for $ 155 or $20 frames or glasses about $6 for the frames and with lenses it might be$ 20 to $30 total okay thanks similar question about uneven like I have a minus 6.5 and a minus5 do I work work on like do I just do like a do a like a negative -6 and leave this the same or do I kind of Step them both back at the same time I mean how do you work with this you know without the blinking thing or whatever yours are pretty close so they might work but if you want wink or or block the stronger eye and work with the minus 61 first until it's down to a minus5 and you can you can use the smell the Snelling chart there too with a single eye you know read as far as you can and wait till your eyes are more even and then they'll proceed together it's just like what what if you went into the gym and you had one a strong right arm and a weaker left arm you you would want to work the weaker arm first until they were both similar so I could get glasses that I only am stepping down one lens first something like that if I get those or just put a patch or diffuser in front of one lens I see okay thank you hi um I was just curious to see how much your axial length has actually changed since um doing this method unfortunately I don't have the device for measuring my axal that requires a sophisticated apparatus however the study that I cited there uh uh you can read about 28 different patients and and see all the measurements that were made on their eyes but typically if you look at the um the results that they got it would be by several millimeters uh so I saw sorry several microns yes okay um so I think one of the things that your method teaches is um improving your uh visual Acuity and not necessarily um changing of the Optics of the eye which is um which can help but I just want to um say that it is the the optical issues that are in place um are not being uh corrected for it's just improving your visual Acuity through practice I just want to say that yeah if you have other eye conditions outside of you know myopia uh yes this doesn't deal with those thank you for a very side F talk I I have a question about the font size when you're doing this a lot of people especially here in the Bay Area in Tech are using bigger font size but they're staying at the same distance um so would you still recommend um even if you use a bigger font size to move away from the screen is that a right obviously there's a connection between font size and distance so the recommendation here was for normal size font if it's larger you would have to move back farther to get the same benefit so being being on a short distance even if even um despite using a beer fund the problem is focusing on a at a short distance is that correct that's right so you want you want to increase the distance whatever the font size is by moving back farther and farther progressively thank you um if you have kids who have 2020 Vision how do you prevent them from ending up with glasses like I have yeah good question so first of all good high which means don't work too close up right work fur their way but if they want to do that they can go by weak plus lenses like the plus ones the readers very inexpensive just go into any pharmacy they're there if they're doing extended work have them wear those a lot of people look at this as a preventive technique and uh do it an experiment have them put the plus lenses on and read for an hour and take them off and ask them do you now see the world more crisply and clearly than you did before just ask them thank you okay I think uh two more questions um I've never had an issue with myopia but I'm getting to a point where I need glasses to read um and and more recently um driving at night is less comfortable wondering any ideas around around those two issues I think the two go together as you age it it is you know your your vision does deteriorate and it's harder to see things at night in particular uh one thing I didn't touch on is you know good diet I think that helps a lot in terms of a low insulin type diet um and also plenty of uh phytonutrients to make your have your rods and cones healthy so you can detect color and low light but I also just think that these methods of uh of of of healthy focusing are going to be helpful at night because you'll see the car lights and the details that you need to see more crisply so same same principles that you the same principles yeah okay final question what would happen if people kept going after Vision became normal again would it continue improving ah there's one post on an interview that I did on my site with a student who had poor vision he got to 2020 and he said I want to do better than this I want super vision and he got himself down to 2015 um go on my it's called how one person improved his vision or one person improved his eyesight and he used the method to get all the way to 2015 and if he kept going like that would that create the opposite problem for myopia uh ah no I mean so you can you just get better and better distance Vision right but you can use the same process for hyperopia if you cannot see things uh that close up then you and you have to read like this then do the opposite pull them in pull them in until they're at the edge and eventually you'll be able to read more close up you basically can change the shape of your eye in either direction by using active focusing right so with continuing after it was normal like after myopia fixed create hyperopia not necessarily no I mean because it's it's right you're as long as you're flexible and you're able to exercise your eyes so that you're looking both close up and then the vision and I I advocate alternating the two it's it it increases the range of focus from near to far thank you I got a question um if you improve your myopia using your Technique do you think that's going to reduce your chances of Macar degeneration uh it it may if you look at some of the causal contributors to macular degeneration retinal detachment eye floaters you'll see myopia listed prominently there it's not the only cause but there is a connection there okay thank you very much