Every couple of years I have my eyes tested to update my reading glasses. On a recent visit the optician was concerned by the pressure test (that's where they put a squirt of air into the eye using a gadget that records the eye pressure). The optician was not happy with my results and made me an appointment with an eye specialist. Several tests later I was told that I would need eye drops for the rest of my life to slow up the onset of Glaucoma. With this condition left unchecked, you can go blind so the drops were a small price to pay.
Glaucoma affects one in 200 people aged 50 and younger, and one in 10 over the age of 80. It's the leading cause of blindness in African-Americans. Fortunately, early treatment can reduce the pressure to the eye and thus avoid the possibility of blindness.
As a result of this affecting me personally, I've come to appreciate my sight more. I now look for foods such as broccoli, spinach, salmon for omega-3, dark chocolate, avocados, carrots, red wine.
My motto? Eat healthy to stay healthy and stay away as much as you can from highly processed foods like refined white flour, pastas, white bread, trans fats, monosodium glutamate. These can all cause a detrimental effect to the health of your eyes, and for that matter your body..
20/20 vision, what's it mean: basically it say that if your 20 feet away from an eye chart you can see what a normal person sees. As we get older our sight unfortunately get worse and for most over the age of fifty the 20/20 vision is but a dream. However in this modern day of ours we hear of advances in the medical world that gives us hope, that maybe, just maybe our sight can get better or at least shop getting worse.
While we look to the future to see improvements in eye health care, we can also look back and see some of the great thinkers of the past such as Dr.W.H. Bates 1860-1931 Bates was a successful eye surgeon who became dissatisfied with conventional methods of the day. He gave up his practice and joined the Columbia University for the sole purpose of studying eyes from an entirely different point of view. During his life-time he wrote of his successes, his work was tested and the technique he developed was their after called "the bates method".
Bates published a number of papers and in 1920 published Perfect Sight Without Glasses. You can get a FREE copy of this book by going to http://visionsofjoy.org
