Comment by juris

what if, and hear me out, glasses "cause" myopia?

To my memory, I played outside as a kid and had perfect vision. I didn't have access to a television growing up. I grew, my skull changed, my eye size changed, so my vision got blurry in 1st grade. I was (suddenly) very nearsighted. The teacher noticed, so they put glasses on me. The controversial claim: it is normal for eyesight to change during childhood and in adolescence and glasses may lock in a child's myopia.

Now I'm sure genes and environment, television and computer use, food quality, etc play a big role (my father also wears (weaker) glasses, and we were always low-income / made poor dietary decisions), but if it's the case that eyesight strength is malleable to some extent (with exercise, with playing outside in sunlight vs looking at television), and if it's the case that the epidemic outstrips genetic variance here over this timeline (surely?), I'd bet good money that slapping lenses on a kid during developmental years is as bad as giving a kid a tablet, moreso than one's genes.

I find it interesting that sometimes -my brain- can make out what faraway text reads as is but it is apparently -blurry- to my eyes. Like a blindsight phenomenon? Like the mechanics of sight, the muscle apparatus, etc is weak and underdeveloped (or developed to compensate for glasses), but the brain unhindered by developmental obstruction is doing the 'seeing'. Totally subjective, probably wrong.

Curious what folks might think in countries with traditional Hanzi / Kanji script might think. Are they really seeing what they read? How about their elders? How is it the case that after many years of reading such incredibly small script old folks retain their eyesight, but suddenly their children's children cannot (over a comparatively smaller span of time)? The answer is pretty obviously technology / environmental differences in each generation's developmental years. Why weren't those old folks also screwed? Well they didn't write / read at a young age -> no need for glasses for them early on.

This epidemic is occluded by the advent of the LCD screen, but not directly caused. What if glasses themselves and an increased effort to get kids glasses is playing a role in developing a myopia epidemic?

EDIT: haha, ok, one (unintended, misconstrued) reading of the actual article is "we put cute helmets and lenses on chickens at development and look how we messed up their eyeballs."