Bates Was Right

William Horatio Bates, MD

I am not going to say he was right on every single thing, but I am going to say he was right. This is where my journey in vision started. I was a naive spring high school sophomore forced to go go without my glasses for over a week because I lost my glasses. My extensive curiousity prompted me to put my feelers out through our dial-up connection and see what was out there as far as natural vision improvement, and of course Bates is the poster guy. However, I did not fully engage with exploration of his methods until my junior year of highschool. That next year is when I decided to give palming a try. I printed out an eye chart with barely the ability to see the top letter. I layed myself down on the couch, and palmed for 5 minutes. As I lifted my hands away and opened my eyes to gaze at the eyechart 10 feet away, to my amazement, I could instantly see 3 lines down...

for all but less than 1/4 of a second!

This could not have been tension as I placed no pressure of my hand on my hands per Dr. Bate's specific instructions. Could it have been lid tension? Maybe. I didn't care. I made up my mind to believe, in all my heart, that vision could be improved upon. I read through all of Bate's work: his magazines, his book, and some published journal articles from that era. I convinced and indoctrinated myself that this was true contrary to the accepted biology.

I will admit, there were a few things that bothered me. Example, in the Q & A at the end of his February 1922 edition he was asked what the purpose of the ciliary body was. "I do not know" was his succinct reply. Dr. Bates, in all his wisdom, rejected the idea that ciliary body was the primary force of action in the change of optics power to accommodate changes in focus of the eyes. He rejected this because of his claimed observation of accommodation occuring in abscence of the crystalline lens. However, I am one of principle, that if it was put there by God, which it was, then it must have a purpose. At least Dr. Bates was man enough to say "I don't know", but I would think he would be wrong to say it plays no role.

Bates main premise is that the extraocular muscles surrounding the eyes play the star role in accommodation. He believed that stress and something he called "the strain" was inhibiting the muscles from not only performing their proper coordinated actions, but causing them to improperly coordinate applying a certain combination of pressure changing the shape of the eye and the curvature of the cornea producing refractive errors of different sorts.

I personally at that time accepted his premise all because of less than 1/4 second experience, of which I could replicate for another 1/4 second and so on. I got excited. As a believer in the good Lord, I prayed to him..."Please let me figure this out without direct help so I learn in order to teach others."

DO NOT EVER pray such as stupid prayer. I have had, to my unsurprise, great frustration with the Bates Method, but I still believed it. I kept practicing. Trying it. Being filled with head-knowledge of his written facts and little successful execution. Then one day months later, while riding as a passenger in my small town, I looked up and about 100 feet away I saw the stop sign clear clear clear, and the "4-WAY" written underneath very clear. This was what I would consider my first true "Flash of clear vision." Oh what I would have done to get that again. Eventually I would, but with great frustration.

At the beginning of my senior year, I reached out to Esther Joy van der Werf of VisionsofJoy.org. I took her email course. I have gotten to know Esther quite well. What a real gem of joy she truly was. This increased my frequency of "flashes". I kept in touch with Esther off-and-on never truly loosing touch with her. Needless to say, I would still get very frustrated with the Bates Method: especially since these flashes just seemed to be so random. I once asked her how often do -6.00 and above myope client truly do get remediation. She was honest with me and admitted that true success at that level was not very often. I could see why. I myself was clocking in at -6.50ish when I entered optometry school.

When I entered, I gave up a lot of practice on the Bates Method, but always wondered about it and would consider his model during Vision Sensation and Perception or Ocular Physiology class seeking for reconciliation in many subjects. I just couldn't let it go. I cracked down and was fitted by another student 3 years ahead of me for daily disposable contact lenses. -6.50 in the right eye and -7.00 in the left. In the lab for our practice, we were taught the acuity must make sense(e.g. -4.00 should be 20/400, -2.00 20/200 to 20/100 and so on). My lab partner that evening for practice measured my acuity where I read 20/70 and 20/80, however, she stopped with retinoscopy with the most puzzeled look on her face.

"It's not making sense is it?" I asked.

"No, I am already at -4.25 and I still have yet to take out my working distance," she replied.

(If she took it out then it would have been -6.75 and my acuity should have been worse than 20/400).

"Don't worry. It is not going to make sense," I stated. "Just do the measurement how you would do it with any other."

After practice, I went ahead and told her about the Bates Method. This experience gave me the confirmation to keep holding onto it. The Bates Method was brought up briefly only one time in optics class where the professor stated that Bates claimed that he could do retinoscopy on a baseball player. I went back and read it, and Bates himself wrote of it as a hypothetical not actually making such claim. Such as gross misrepresentation of someone's words. I still respect this professor to this day though. He is a fabulous teacher and I pull a lot from my memories of his optics class even now.

As I continued through my schooling, I would draw from knowledge from the Oculomotility class, learned about how refractions could actually change. The class the year prior called this section of the pediatric optometry class "refractive engineering" and gave me great hope to continue to hold onto this method. This very professor was open to reducing my glasses power and started with -5.75 and bifocal combinations. I would then, off and on, attempt to push it down further with spurts of practice with the Bates Method. Slowly and surely I could get it down and still...well, but myopic and only get random "flashes." Again, a frustrating experience.

After graduation, I did become quite successful in my practice where I may be. Whether it be primary optometry care, correction optometry care, or in the vision development and rehab practice. Occassionally, even in the vision development clinic, a parent would ask me from time to time about doing vision therpay to get rid of glasses. At this point, I knew about some Behavioral Optometry methods to slow down myopia progression, but not reversal. Sometimes the patient woudl be quite hyperopic. I could not then, and cannot now, gauarantee a result for refractive error improvement, especially as something as unreliable as the Bates Method. Sometimes a parent or patient would push and ask about it and my prescription. I would tell them, that I was wearing a -4.50 when I used to wear a -6.50.

"How did you do that?" they would ask.

"A long process of multiple years, persevereance and motivation," I replied.

No further questions were typically asked after that.

I remember occassionally I would pray, "Please forgive me of that prayer, and just help me. I give up," and I would not seem to get an answer.

Occassionally I would get into some discussions about Bates with other colleagues. One elder colleague of mine respectfully disagreed with me after telling me that astigmatism is actually caused by primary eye scan pattern function. I said this is consistent with Bates and she respectfully disagreed as did I from her. She ended up telling another colleague to tell me "Bate's was wrong" if that collegaue were to encounter me somewhere. Well, haha, we ended up hiring that other collegaue at our office, who told me "Bates was wrong." I put forth some support and evidence in our own literature for my opinion of which this colleague seemed to skeptically be open to.

6 months prior was when I decided to do another push. I can get down to -3.50. Technically a -3.00, but I thought that would be too stressful for day-to-day wear and be distracting from my work with patients. Around that time, I decided to give Stress And Vision by Dr. Elliot Forrest, late professor at a prestigeous the optometry school State University of New York Optometry a serious read. I read about a model that described, without actually stating the obvious in the chapter that is extremely consistent with the selection of syntonic filter combinations and also that of myopia progression. I pondered this for about a year. Things began to make total since, not only for vision problems, but, since our Lord and creator Jesus Christ is correct about the eye being the lamp of the body, explains the entire pathophysiology of many chronic diseases. I decided to start this website, built my logo and my X account.

The very weekend I made my logo, I was walking in the park thinking about 3 respectable colleagues of mine:

-Dr. Steven Curtis and his presentations on syntonics being non-cognitive, subcortical, autonomic training.

-Dr. Dave Cook and his "shape of the sky" techniques.

-Dr. Curt Baxtrum and his work on visual motion

And of course Dr. Bates. I thought to myself, "Now wait a minute!, there are cognitive eye movements (Bates' teaches that the eye is only at rest with continuous movements) and of course non-cognitive eye movements, chiefly being Vestibular Ocular Reflex(VOR) and Optokinesis."

Bate's swinging technique is supposed to work on VOR I would say.

Then I thought, "I have spent the last 19 years doing it the 'Bates Method' way, what if I do it the optometric way and use the non-cognitive functions. I can use optokinesis. To do that I will do "shape of the sky" technique to objective the space between the contours rather than the object, and that way I can forget about the contours and see the space. Space is space, so I do not actually have to clear it. Then non-cognitive optokinetic movement can take over and I can let that do what Bates said to do and have the eyes in continuous movement...non-cognitive movement."

I took off my glasses and then observed as a "FLASH" of clarity began. I attempted to hold onto it. 19 years of this, I know "holding onto it" only makes it go away. So I repeated it, and sure enough there was another flash of clear vision. This went on many times. It was my child's birthday at the park. I thought, "best gift I ever got for the child's birthday!" The difference here, was I didn't get this pain and watery eyes form "holding onto" the clarity as that was part of my frustration. It was reflex I could not seem to break. I could maintain this clarity better, and it was no longer random. I remembered my prayer from entrace to optometry school, "Please dear Lord, make me the best doctor I could possibly be." I realized this is finally the reality. The science for the neuro-vision pathways are already written in the literature, both optometric and neuro-cognitive science. I felt a word..."Now GET TO WORK!"

Optometry holds the keys to ending this myopia pandemic once and for all. We have some good tools, both in the behavioral optometric arm and the contact lens arm of the profession. The optics science for this is solid. Everything now makes sense between the optics and the neuro science. I am proud that I have several collegaues interested becuase many optometrists are becoming more concerned. I truly believe this realization, the connecting of the dots, is a gift from God and we ought to praise him for his grace to allow this knowledge to come about.

Bates was indeed right! but his model was extremely incomplete. I do give him a break. Neurophysiology was just budding. What he called "strain" is better desribed as "habituated neuro-adapative inhibition" of proper visual function. September 1919 he stated in regards to a 15 minute "cure":

"These quick cures are very rare, except in case of children under twelve; but they do occur, and I believe the time is coming when it will be possible to cure everyone quickly. It is only a question of accumulating more facts and presenting them in such as a way that the patient can grasp them quickly."

This statement always stood out to me since high school. I believe I found it. What took me months to get my first "flash" I can teach in sometimes as little as 2 minutes now to demonstrate to an individual the change in visual clarity. Not all are so fast, but I can at least get some type of demonstration within 20 minutes on the vast majority. Of course, I cannot garauntee any "cure" nor do I or would I. A "flash" is a flash. In theory, it needs to be habituated, and that is something only the person learning can ensure. No doctor, teacher, instructor, tutor etc, can ever assuredly gaurentee success.

After this marvelous weekend, I go up to my colleague in the office at the end of the day and say, "Bates is right and I can prove it!"

"I'm too tired to get into discussions right now I need to get home," she stated.

"Just give me 5 minutes!" I exlaimed.

We walked to the decorative eye chart in the optical section. She removed her minus lenses and stood twelvish feet away. I took only estimated 30 seconds to 1 minute explaining the concept and directing her fixation and suddenly she jumps back "OH MY GOD THAT'S CLEAR!"

"See, told you he was right."

"Let's prove it!" she stated.

Yes, Let's! Optometry now has a repeatable and dependable clinical observable method. Now it is time to get to work on the science and end this myopia epidemic.