You may have seen advertisements claiming to eliminate the need for eyeglasses through vision therapy or vision training – basically, eye exercises. These exercises include putting pressure on or palming the eye; eye movement exercises; or straining to read by using the wrong prescription glasses to “train” the eyes. As a professor of ophthalmology – and as an eye doctor who has seen thousands of patients – I can tell you that no study to date shows strong evidence that these exercises eliminate the need for glasses or offer any long-term significant benefits .
The science simply isn’t there . Understanding the science The lack of evidence holds true for virtually all eye conditions and diseases, including common afflictions such as myopia , or nearsightedness, which refers to when closer objects are clear, but distant objects are blurry. It’s also true for farsightedness – also called hyperopia – which happens when objects are clear in the distance but blurry up close.
Nor do these eye exercises help with presbyopia , or the need for reading glasses, which generally begins at around age 40. With presbyopia, the patient is neither nearsighted nor farsighted and requires no glasses for distance vision. Yet as the lens of the eye becomes stiffer over time, the eye struggles to focus on fine print and smaller text.
This decline will continue with age – and, with it, the need for stronger reading glasses will increase. Although some methods claim to alleviate .
