> I've always been a little surprised why we haven't figured out a treatment for myopia
Isn't the treatment for "treatable" myopia "spend more time in the sun"? IIRC, something about spending time in the sun prevents/reverses myopia in most children.
I also seem to recall that you can sleep in pure oxygen and it will change your eyesight (the cornea gets its oxygen directly from the atmosphere and high oxygen concentration encourages growth which thickens the cornea).
If myopia is structural though (misshapen eyeball, aged muscles not working to focus, etc.), what kind of non-surgical treatment would you expect to work?
One other problem that comes up is that the neural "integrators" in the human control systems get "leaky" with age. If you ask someone above about age 40 to look completely to the right or left, you can observe their eyeball "vibrate" as the saccades correct the integration error in tracking position.
(This was given as an exercise in a bioenginering class for "model the human eye tracking system". You had a series of observations you had to take and measure and then derive both the control system and the rough time constants. One of the observations that you had to account for was why the older grad students/professors had this "vibration". You could create this behavior if your "integrator" block was leaky.)
> One of the observations that you had to account for was why the older grad students/professors had this "vibration".
Microsaccade amplitude is correlated with uncorrected myopia, actually. If you have visual blur it seems fixational eye movements have higher amplitude. (Proper corrective lenses generally remove this effect).
Of course, if someone has astigmatism, often it won't be properly corrected looking far right or left, too. I'm guessing this is the effect you measured.
Isn't the treatment for "treatable" myopia "spend more time in the sun"? IIRC, something about spending time in the sun prevents/reverses myopia in most children.
I also seem to recall that you can sleep in pure oxygen and it will change your eyesight (the cornea gets its oxygen directly from the atmosphere and high oxygen concentration encourages growth which thickens the cornea).
If myopia is structural though (misshapen eyeball, aged muscles not working to focus, etc.), what kind of non-surgical treatment would you expect to work?
One other problem that comes up is that the neural "integrators" in the human control systems get "leaky" with age. If you ask someone above about age 40 to look completely to the right or left, you can observe their eyeball "vibrate" as the saccades correct the integration error in tracking position.
(This was given as an exercise in a bioenginering class for "model the human eye tracking system". You had a series of observations you had to take and measure and then derive both the control system and the rough time constants. One of the observations that you had to account for was why the older grad students/professors had this "vibration". You could create this behavior if your "integrator" block was leaky.)