William H. Bates, M.D. is the grandfather of Vision Training. His ground breaking research accomplished in the period from 1910 to 1914 and the publication of the first article in the Bulletin of the New York Zoological Society, November 1914. The scientific basis for Vision Training is well established through experiments with animals as well as clinical trials. Over the last 90 years many people have benefited from Dr. Bates pioneering work. Perhaps most compelling is the idea that you can actually regain your eyesight through natural means.

Here is how Dr. William H. Bates describe his finding in his own words:

"Examining 30,000 pairs of eyes a year at the New York Eye and Ear Infirmary and other institutions, I observed … many cases in which errors of refraction either recovered spontaneously, or changed their form, and I was unable either to ignore them, or to satisfy myself with the orthodox explanations, even where such explanations were available. It seemed to me that if a statement is truth it must always be truth. There can be no exceptions. If errors of refraction are irreversible, they should not recover, or change their form, spontaneously.

In the course of time I discovered that myopia and hypermetropia, like astigmatism, could be produced at will; that myopia was not, as we have so long believed, associated with the use of the eyes at the near point, but with a strain to see distant objects, strain at the near point being associated with hypermetropia; that no error of refraction was ever a constant condition…

 [The focal length – the distance between the lens and the film – of a camera is increased to focus near objects clearly. The focal length is decreased to focus far objects clearly. As noted above, the curvature of a camera's lens never changes.] Equally convincing was the demonstration that errors of refraction [near-sightedness, astigmatism, and far-signtedness], including presbyopia, are due not to an organic change in the shape of the eyeball or in the constitution of the lens, but to a functional and therefore reversible derangement in the action of the extrinsic muscles.

In making these statements I am well aware that I am contravening the practically undisputed teaching of ophthalmological science for the better part of a century;… but I have been driven to the conclusions which they embody by the facts, and that so slowly that I am surprised by my own blindness. At the time I was improving high degrees of myopia; but I wanted to be conservative, and I differentiated between functional myopia, which I was able to reverse, or improve, and organic myopia, which, in deference to the orthodox tradition, I accepted as irreversible.

Much of my information about the eyes has been obtained by means of simultaneous retinoscopy. The retinoscope is an instrument used to measure the refraction of the eye. It throws 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. On looking through the sight-hole one sees a larger or smaller part of the pupil filled with light, which in normal human eyes is a reddish yellow, because this is the colour of the retina, but which is green in a cat’s eye, and might be white if the retina were diseased. Unless the eye is exactly focused at the point from which it is being observed, one sees also a dark shadow at the edge of the pupil, and it is the behaviour of this shadow when the mirror is moved in various directions which reveals the refractive condition of the eye … This exceedingly useful instrument has possibilities which have not been generally realized by the medical profession …

For thirty years I have been using the retinoscope to study the refraction of the eye. With it I have examined 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. I have used it when the subjects were at rest and when they were in motion – also when I myself was in motion;… I have used it in daytime and at night, when the subjects were comfortable and when they were excited; when they were trying to see and when they were not; when they were lying and when they were telling the truth; when the eyelids were partly closed, shuttling off part of the area of the pupil, when the pupil was dilated, and also when it was contracted to a pin-point; when the eyes were oscillating from side to side, from above downward and in other directions.

In this way I discovered many facts which had not previously been known, and which I was quite unable to reconcile with the orthodox teachings on the subject. This lead me to undertake the series of experimenters already alluded to. The results were in entire harmony with my previous observations, and left me no choice but to reject the entire body of orthodox teachings about accommodation and errors of refraction. “

“The function of the muscles on the outside of the eyeball, apart from that of turning the globe in its socket, has been a matter of much dispute; but after the supposed demonstration by Helmholtz that accommodation depends on the change in curvature of the lens, the possibility of their being concerned in the adjustment of the eye for vision at different distances, or in the production of errors of refraction, was dismissed as no longer worthy of serious consideration.

… In my own experiments upon the extrinsic eye muscles of fish, rabbits, cats, dogs and other animals, the demonstration seemed to be complete that in the eyes of these animals accommodation depends wholly upon the action of the extrinsic muscles and not at all upon the agency of the lens. By manipulation of these muscles I was able to produce or prevent accommodation at will, to myopia, hypermetropia and astigmatism, or to prevent these conditions. Full details of these experiments will be found in the “Bulletin of the New York Zoological Society” for November, 1914, and in the “New York Medical Journal” for May 8, 1915; and May 18, 1918; but for the benefit of those who have not the time or inclination to read these papers, their contents are summarized below.

There are six muscles on the outside of the eyeball, four known as the “recti” and two and the “obliques.” The obliques form an almost complete belt around the middle of the eyeball, and are known, according to their position, as “superior” and “inferior.” The recti are attached to the sclerotic, or outer coat of the eyeball, near the front, and pass directly over the top, bottom and sides of the globe to the back of the orbit, where they are attached to the bone around the edges of the hole through which the optic nerve passes. According to their position, they are known as the “superior,” “inferior,” “internal,” and “external recti. The obliques are the muscles of accommodation; the recti are concerned in the production of hypermetropia and astigmatism.

In some cases one of the obliques is absent or rudimentary, but when two of these muscles were present and active, accommodation, as measured by the objective test of retinoscopy, was always produced by electrical stimulation either of the eyeball, or the nerves of accommodation near their origin in the brain. It was produced by any manipulation of the obliques whereby their pull was increased. This was done by a tucking operation of one or both muscles, or by an advancement of the point at which they are attached to the sclerotic. When one or more of the recti had been cut, the effect of operations increasing the pull of the obliques was intensified.

After one or both of the obliques had been cut across, or after they had been paralyzed by the injection of atropine deep into the orbit, accommodation could never be produced by electrical stimulation; but after the effects of the atrophine has passed away, or a divided muscle had been sewed together, accommodation followed electrical stimulation just as usual.

Again when one oblique muscle was absent, as was found to be the case in a dogfish, a shark and a few perch, or rudimentary, as in all cats observed, a few fish and an occasional rabbit, accommodation could not be produced by electrical stimulation. But when the rudimentary muscles was strengthened by advancement, or the absent one was replaced by a suture which supplied the necessary countertraction, accommodation could always be produced by electrical stimulation.

It should be emphasized that in order to paralyze either the recti muscles, or the obliques, it was found necessary to inject the atrophine far back behind the eyeball with a hyperaemic needle. This drug is supposed to paralyzed the accommodation when dropped into the eyes of human beings or animals, but in all of my experiments it was found that when used in this way it had very little effect upon the power of the eye to change its focus.

… Eyes from which the lens had been removed, or in which it had been pushed out of the axis of vision, responded to electrical stimulation precisely as did the normal eye, so long as the muscles were active; but when they had been paralyzed by the injection of atrophine deep into the orbit, electrical stimulation had no effect on the refraction.

In one experiment the lens was removed from the right eye of a rabbit, the refraction of each eye having first been tested by retinoscopy and found to be normal. The wound was then allowed to heal. Thereafter, for a period extending from one month to two years, electrical stimulation always produced accommodation in the lensless eye precisely to the same extent as in the eye which had a lens. The same result was performed on a number of other rabbits, on dogs, and on fish. The obvious conclusion is that the lens is not a factor in accommodation.

In most text-books on physiology it is stated that accommodation is controlled by the third cranial nerve, which supplies all the muscles of the eyeball except the superior oblique and the external rectus; but the forth cranial nerve, which supplies only the superior oblique, was found in these experiments to be just as much a nerve of accommodation as the third. When either the third or the forth nerve was stimulated with electricity near its point of origin in the brain, accommodation always resulted in the normal eye. When the origin of either nerve was covered with a small piece of cotton soaked in a two percent solution of atropine.sulphate in a normal salt solution, stimulation of that nerve produced no accommodation, while stimulation of the unparalyzed nerve did produce it. When the origin of both nerves was covered with cotton soaked in atrophine, accommodation could not be produced by electrical stimulation of either or both. When the cotton was removed and the nerves washed with normal salt solution, electrical stimulation of either or both produced accommodation just as before the atrophine had been applied.

This experiment, which was performed repeatedly for more than an hour by alternately applying and removing the atrophine, not only demonstrated clearly what had not been known before, namely, that the forth nerve is a nerve of accommodation, but also demonstrated that the superior oblique muscle which is supplied by it, is an important factor in accommodation. It was further found that when the action of the oblique muscles was prevented by dividing them, the stimulation of the third nerve produced not accommodation but hypermetropia.

In all the experiments all sources of error are believed to have been eliminated. They are all repeated many times and always with the same result. They seemed, therefore, to leave no room for doubt that neither the lens nor any of the muscle inside the eyeball has anything to do with accommodation, but that the process whereby the eye adjusts itself for vision at different distances is entirely controlled by the action of the muscles on the outside of the globe.”

Quoted from “Perfect Eyesight without Glasses,” (1920) by William H. Bates M.D.

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