Your Glasses Are Making Your Eyes Worse

An Essay on the Three Mechanisms by Which Corrective Lenses Drive the Deterioration They Claim to Correct

This essay is the third in a three-part sequence that began with the question raised in a March 2025 conversation between Dr. Andrew Kaufman and Matt from Cultivate Elevate about what the mainstream treatment of the eye actually does to the eye. The first essay, The Permanent UV Block They Install in Your Eye, took up cataract surgery. This one takes up corrective lenses and the progressive prescription nearly all wearers experience as inevitable. The essay works in two registers. Where mainstream ophthalmology and chronobiology have documented what glasses do to the eye, their findings are reported in their own vocabulary, with attribution. Where the essay speaks in its own voice, the frame is terrain. William Horatio Bates and Meir Schneider appear as the credentialed historical and contemporary dissenters whose clinical observations the essay rests on; the broader behavioural optometry tradition appears as the professional lineage that has carried their work forward against institutional resistance. The question is why the prescription climbs.

The Permanent UV Block They Install in Your Eye

The Floater Mystery

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Bates in the Consulting Room

In 1920, a Columbia-trained ophthalmologist in New York published a book based on decades of clinical practice setting out the position that glasses do not correct failing eyesight but splint the strain that produced it and let that strain set deeper.¹ William Horatio Bates was no outsider. He took his medical degree from Columbia’s College of Physicians and Surgeons in 1885, served as a well-regarded eye surgeon, and reached his conclusions from inside the consulting room by watching the eyesight of his own patients and colleagues improve when they set their glasses aside. His account inverted the entire logic of correction. If the strained eye produced the refractive error rather than the refractive error producing the strain, then a lens ground to compensate for the error corrected nothing underneath it, and the prescription climbed because the correction, not the eye, was the thing being managed.

A little over a century later, nearly everyone who wears glasses has watched their prescription climb. The lenses get thicker. The eye examined without them is measurably worse than it was before the correction began. The person is told this is normal. They are told it is what eyes do. They are told that aging, screen time, reading, and heredity have combined to produce the inevitable result.

Bates had another explanation.

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The Pattern

The East Asian myopia epidemic has pushed prevalence rates in some young-adult cohorts into the 70 to 90 percent range. A century ago the same populations reported a small fraction of that figure.² The variable has not been genetic drift across three generations. The variable has been the arrival of mass schooling, mass screen use, mass indoor hours, and mass corrective lens prescription.

Mainstream ophthalmology acknowledges the epidemic. It attributes the rise variously to near-work, to insufficient outdoor light exposure, and to a yet-undiscovered combination of factors. What it does not attribute it to is the correction itself. The possibility that the lens prescribed to compensate for the error is also the mechanism driving the progression of the error is not a hypothesis the field investigates with any sustained attention.

Three mechanisms, operating together, produce the result. The glasses do the work the eye should do. The glasses block the light the eye requires. The glasses lock the visual system into a feedback loop in which every change in the eye registers as a change in prescription rather than as a change in condition. The three mechanisms reinforce each other. The prescription climbs because the correction, not the eye, is the thing that is being managed.

The First Mechanism: The Crutch

The ciliary muscle is the small ring of muscle inside the eye that changes the shape of the lens to focus on near and far objects. Looking at a distant mountain, the muscle relaxes and the lens flattens. Looking at a book held close, the muscle contracts and the lens rounds. This is the eye’s own accommodation apparatus, performing continuously, moment by moment, through the whole of the day.

When a corrective lens is placed in front of the eye, the lens does the focusing work. The image lands correctly on the retina not because the ciliary muscle shaped the eye’s own lens to receive it, but because the external lens bent the light into the right configuration before it entered the eye. The muscle, no longer required, works less. Muscles that work less become weaker. This is not a controversial claim. It is the basic principle of physical disuse that applies to every muscle in the body.

Bates observed this directly in his consulting room and set it down in Perfect Sight Without Glasses. Those who wear glasses, he wrote, must keep their focus to the front and centre to escape the distortion at the lens edge; in doing so they lose the muscular flexibility that a free eye retains, the capacity to range and shift that normal sight depends on. The dependency extends further than most wearers notice; many report they cannot even hear as well without their glasses, the habit having fixed itself across the senses.¹

Bates’s own model of accommodation differs from the standard one taught today. He argued that the eye focuses primarily through the external muscles reshaping the whole eyeball, rather than through the internal ciliary muscle alone. The technical dispute does not change the crutch argument. Both models agree the eye performs focusing work and that an external lens relieves the eye of that work. The crutch mechanism holds whichever muscle one credits.

Meir Schneider, who regained usable vision after being declared incurably blind in childhood, phrases the point in the language of a cast. A broken limb needs a cast for a period. The cast must then be gradually removed, with increasing load returned to the limb, or the limb will not regain its strength. Glasses are prescribed as if the eye were permanently broken. The cast is never removed. The eye, held in the correction, loses the capacity it had before.³

A patient who has worn glasses for a decade and then removes them does not see as they would have seen a decade ago without any glasses at all. They see worse. The decade of correction has produced visual atrophy of a kind. The field has a name for it, functional accommodative insufficiency, and treats it as a separate condition requiring further intervention. The possibility that it is the predictable consequence of the original intervention is not raised in the clinical setting.

The Second Mechanism: The UV Block

The lens of a pair of glasses is not neutral to the spectrum. Modern lenses, especially those with the anti-reflective coatings standard on virtually all prescription eyewear sold in the past two decades, filter ultraviolet light before it reaches the eye. Photochromic lenses, which darken on exposure to UV, filter more. Sunglasses filter nearly all of it. The eye behind these lenses receives a visually corrected but spectrally depleted signal.

The first essay in this sequence documented what UV reaching the retina does for the human organism. The suprachiasmatic nucleus uses the signal to regulate melatonin, cortisol, body temperature, mood, and the daily rhythm of sleep. The pineal gland receives the input in a muted form when UV is filtered out of the signal. The retina loses the physiological interaction with the full solar spectrum that the eye was built around.⁴ The entire argument from Essay One applies, with one modification: a pair of glasses can be removed, where an intraocular lens cannot.

Michael Holick’s laboratory work on the extent to which modern populations are chronically sun-deprived rests on the understanding that even brief contact with the full solar spectrum has measurable physiological consequences, and that artificial filters interrupt the input the body requires. His arithmetic on removable sunscreens applies directly to removable eyewear: SPF 15 blocks 99.9 percent of UVB.⁵ The anti-reflective coatings on prescription lenses do not block that proportion, but they do block a substantial fraction, and they block it continuously, for every waking hour the wearer has the glasses on.

Schneider notes that sunglasses in particular block the full spectrum of light frequencies the eye requires to function optimally, weakening the eye’s natural adjustment mechanisms over time.³ The point extends to prescription lenses with UV-filtering coatings. The eye deprived of UV loses the input that calibrates its own sensitivity. The pupil’s capacity to contract and dilate with changing light, the retina’s capacity to shift between bright and dim conditions, and the broader adaptive flexibility of the visual system all depend on exposure to the natural spectrum.

A person who has worn tinted glasses or sunglasses continuously for years develops photophobia when the glasses come off. The field attributes this to oversensitivity of the retina. A more straightforward reading is that the retina has lost its range through disuse. The glasses did not protect the eye. The glasses stripped the eye of the exposure that would have maintained its own adaptive capacity.

The Third Mechanism: The Lock-In

The optometrist examines the eye, measures the refractive error, and prescribes a lens that corrects for the specific state of the eye on the day of the examination. The lens is ground to that specification. For as long as the eye remains in that state, the lens delivers clear vision.

The eye does not remain in that state. The eye is a living organ in a terrain that changes continuously. Over a year, the eye’s actual refractive condition drifts in response to use, strain, fatigue, nutritional status, hormonal change, EMF exposure, and the hundred other variables that constitute the person’s physiological environment. In an uncorrected eye, that drift is handled by the eye’s own accommodation apparatus. The ciliary muscle (or the external muscles, in Bates’s model) adjusts moment by moment to whatever the current demand requires. The eye absorbs the variability.

In a corrected eye, the drift cannot be absorbed. The glass lens is fixed. It was ground for the specification of one day. Any shift in the eye’s actual state registers as a mismatch between the lens and the eye. The mismatch is experienced by the wearer as blurring. The response is a return to the optometrist, who measures the new state and grinds a new lens.

The process has no feedback mechanism that would let the eye recover its own accommodation. Every drift in the eye’s condition is answered by a new fixed lens. The lens freezes the eye around a new specification. The next drift produces the next prescription. The system does not permit the eye to vary its focus naturally, because the glass is always doing the varying for it. The optometrist, examining the eye through this process, sees the eye’s condition changing over time and names that change the progression of the refractive error. What they are measuring is the output of a feedback loop in which the correction is a load-bearing input.

The research that has compared full prescription against under-correction or no correction supports this reading. Studies in children have generally found that under-corrected and un-corrected groups show slower myopic progression than fully corrected groups.⁶ The field has treated this finding with institutional discomfort. The results are not what the standard of care would predict. The response has been to question the methodology rather than to question the standard. The research has not been extended to the scale required to settle the question definitively, because the question’s resolution could only reduce lens sales.

The Three Mechanisms Together

Each mechanism alone has an answer in the mainstream literature. The crutch mechanism is answered by the claim that ciliary muscle atrophy from glasses use is clinically insignificant. The UV deprivation mechanism is answered by the claim that indoor artificial light is the dominant variable and lens filtering is secondary. The lock-in mechanism is answered by the claim that the eye changes with age and the prescription merely tracks the change.

Each answer is defensible against one mechanism in isolation. The three answers together are not defensible against the pattern. If the ciliary muscle does not atrophy, if lens filtering is secondary, and if the eye merely changes with age, then populations that do not wear glasses should show the same progression as populations that do, and the East Asian myopia epidemic should not track the arrival of mass prescription. Populations without glasses do not show the same progression. The epidemic tracks exactly what the three mechanisms predict it would track.

The convergent evidence is harder to dismiss than any single thread. The crutch, the UV block, and the lock-in reinforce each other. The eye that is no longer working its own accommodation, deprived of its full spectrum, and held in a feedback loop that treats every change in condition as a new specification to be corrected, deteriorates. It deteriorates at a rate that varies with how continuously the three mechanisms operate. It deteriorates in a pattern that resembles the one observed in the populations where the three mechanisms are universal and does not resemble the one observed in populations where they are not.

The Dissenting Tradition

The claim that glasses worsen the eye is not a recent invention of critics outside the profession. It is a position developed inside the profession by credentialed practitioners and then systematically suppressed.

Bates set the position down in 1920. His Perfect Sight Without Glasses was the clinical account of a Columbia-trained eye surgeon who had watched his patients’ vision improve when they removed their glasses and worked instead with his method of palming, swaying, shifting, and central fixation. He published a monthly magazine, Better Eyesight, from 1919 to 1930. He trained practitioners who carried the method forward.¹

The institutional response went beyond professional dismissal. The teacher Margaret Corbett, who had trained with Bates and who ran a school in Los Angeles teaching the method, was prosecuted twice in 1940 and 1941 for practising medicine without a license.⁷ Corbett continued teaching afterward and trained practitioners of her own, but the message to anyone considering a career in natural vision work was clear. The prosecutions sent a warning the organized profession could not easily have sent through peer-review or academic channels.

The behavioural optometry tradition that developed in the latter half of the twentieth century carried the method forward in a more institutionally palatable form, as vision therapy within optometric practice rather than as an outside system. Jacob Liberman, whose book Take Off Your Glasses and See is the contemporary entry point for a lay reader, trained in the tradition and reports in his clinical practice the same observations Bates set down a century earlier: patients given the right exercises and the right permission to work without glasses recover visual function the field had told them was permanently lost.⁸

Meir Schneider’s own history is the extreme case. He was born with cataracts, underwent five unsuccessful surgeries as a child, and was declared incurably blind, with 99 percent scar tissue on his lenses. At seventeen he discovered the Bates method, began a regimen of eye exercises, and over subsequent years improved his vision from 1 percent to 55 percent of normal. He later obtained an unrestricted driver’s license. The case does not generalise to every patient, but it does falsify the mainstream claim that congenital blindness from scarring is irreversible. One person who recovered is enough to break the universal claim.³

The method has credentialed modern defenders inside ophthalmology itself. Leonardo Verri Paulino, an ophthalmologist and anterior segment surgeon at ABC Medical School in Brazil, has endorsed Schneider’s method as a complement to his own practice in cases where traditional medicine has its limitations. Amelia Salvador, an ophthalmologist in Alicante, Spain, has stated that her patients’ sight problems get better by taking up the right habits, and credits Schneider as the guide. Ana Cecilia Gois Franco, an ophthalmologist and anterior segment surgeon in São Paulo, has credited the self-healing method with improving both her practice and her own vision. Mauro Rabinovitch, an ophthalmologist in São Paulo, has written that patients who get actively involved with their own healing process go further than those who do not.³

The lineage is unbroken from Bates in 1920 through the behavioural optometry tradition through contemporary practitioners to credentialed ophthalmologists currently practising. The claim that the dissent is fringe is empirically wrong. The claim that it has been engaged on its merits by mainstream ophthalmology is also wrong. The dissent has been contained, prosecuted where it was easiest to prosecute, dismissed where it could not be prosecuted, and allowed to continue on the margins where its elimination would have cost more than its containment.

The Pattern Recognition

The pattern is the one Essay One identified in the context of cataract surgery and the earlier companion essay Cataract identified in the context of what the cataract itself is.⁹ Ophthalmology perfects an intervention it never tries to understand. The clouded lens is removed. The clouded lens is not asked why it clouded. The refractive error is corrected. The refractive error is not asked why it developed, or why it progresses, or why populations without the correction do not experience the progression the correction is held to compensate for.

The clinical culture is organised around removal and compensation, not around understanding or around reversal. The eye is treated as a piece of hardware that has broken, not as a living organ that is responding to a terrain. The response is mechanical: for the clouded lens, a plastic replacement; for the refractive error, a ground lens held in front of the eye. In each case the response addresses the symptom and in each case the response participates in producing more of the condition it was meant to address. The cataract and the progressive prescription are two visible forms of the same underlying terrain condition, each addressed with the same mechanical strategy.

What Reversal Looks Like

The progression is not fixed. The eye that has been in corrective lenses for decades can, in many cases, recover a substantial portion of the capacity it has lost. This depends on the specific condition, the duration of the correction, the terrain of the person, and the sustained attention they bring to the process. It is not what ophthalmology offers. It is what Bates offered, what the behavioural optometry tradition offers, and what practitioners in that tradition continue to offer today.

The lay reader looking for an entry point can start with Liberman’s Take Off Your Glasses and See, which lays out the method in contemporary form, and Schneider’s Vision for Life, which carries the Bates method forward with Schneider’s own additions. A behavioural optometrist, where one is accessible, can supervise the process clinically. The practice is slow. It requires the eye to re-learn the accommodation it has been given over to the glass for years or decades. What it offers in exchange is the possibility of an eye that is its own again, no longer locked in the feedback loop that would otherwise produce the next prescription, and the next.

The alternative is the one most wearers accept without noticing they are accepting it: thicker lenses every few years, a visual system that functions only through the glass, and the eventual arrival at the cataract that Essay One addressed. The lenses were not neutral. The system that prescribed them was not addressing the eye. It was managing the correction.

How to Explain It to a Six-Year-Old

Imagine your legs get a little bit weak, so your mom buys you a pair of crutches to help you walk. The crutches work. You can walk again.

Because the crutches are doing the work your legs would normally do, your legs don’t have to try as hard. And legs that don’t try get a little bit weaker. So after a while you need stronger crutches, because your legs are weaker than they were before.

The person at the crutch store doesn’t tell you your legs are getting weaker because of the crutches. They just measure your legs, say they need more help, and give you the new crutches. A while later they do the same thing again. And again.

If you took the crutches away and worked with your legs for a long time, carefully, they might get stronger again. That is also true for eyes. The glasses are the crutches. The optometrist is the crutch store.

The legs get weaker. The crutches get stronger.

In Print

The Unbekoming library is available in paperback, printed to order through Lulu and shipped worldwide. The shelf begins with the paradigm question underneath everything else — No Virus, the isolation problem, the collapse of virology’s foundational claims, and a disease-by-disease reappraisal — and moves through the suppressed compounds mainstream medicine set aside: The DMSO Book, Chlorine Dioxide: The Forbidden Remedy, The Iodine Book, and The Hydrogen Peroxide Book. Two more recover what’s still on the kitchen shelf: Baking Soda and The Castor Oil Book. Two more recover the minerals modern soil, water, and processing quietly stripped from the diet: The Magnesium Handbook and The Boron Book. Sitting alongside these is No Contagion, co-authored with Jamie Andrews — the case against germ theory itself, catalogued through 258 failed contagion experiments.

The critique books cover what medicine, dentistry, psychiatry, and veterinary practice have become. The Unvaccinated treats the completely unvaccinated as a comparison group across twenty chapters and five appendices. Medicalized Motherhood follows a woman through 123 documented interventions from teenage pill to postpartum discharge. Drilling for Profit treats cavities, gum disease, and crooked teeth as the dietary problem they are. What Your Vet Can’t Tell You applies the same critique to pets. Escape from Psychiatry documents the fabrication of the DSM and the specific damage of every major psychiatric drug class. The Vitamin K Injection covers what happens in the first hours of a newborn’s life.

The full shelf is at lulu.com/spotlight/unbekoming. A physical book reaches the person a Substack post never will — the skeptical relative, the friend who won’t click a link but might open a book, the visitor whose eye lands on a coffee table. Buy one to keep, and one to give away.

References

1. Bates, William Horatio. Perfect Sight Without Glasses (also issued as The Cure of Imperfect Sight by Treatment Without Glasses), 1920. The edition referenced here is the 2005 Sterling Publishers edition published under the title Better Eyesight Without Glasses, which restores some of the material cut from Emily Bates’s 1943 abridgement. For Bates’s medical credentials, his clinical observations on spectacle dependency and the loss of flexibility across the senses, his magazine Better Eyesight (1919–1930), and the method itself.

2. The East Asian myopia epidemic has been documented across the mainstream ophthalmology literature and in reports from the World Health Organization and the Chinese Ministry of Health, with prevalence rates in young-adult cohorts in several East Asian countries reported in the 70 to 90 percent range in recent years.

3. Schneider, Meir. Vision for Life: Ten Steps to Natural Eyesight Improvement. North Atlantic Books, 2012. For Schneider’s own case history, the method, and the endorsements from Verri Paulino, Salvador, Gois Franco, and Rabinovitch.

4. “The Permanent UV Block They Install in Your Eye.” Unbekoming, 2026. The first essay in this three-part sequence.

5. Holick, Michael F. and Jenkins, Mark. The UV Advantage. iBooks, 2003. For the SPF arithmetic and the broader documentation of sun deprivation.

6. The under-correction and no-correction research in myopia progression has been published across the ophthalmology literature over several decades, with results generally indicating slower progression in under-corrected and un-corrected cohorts than in fully corrected cohorts. The research has not been expanded to the scale required to settle the question definitively.

7. The twin 1940–1941 prosecutions of Margaret Corbett for teaching the Bates method in Los Angeles are documented in the historical record of natural vision practice. Corbett continued teaching after the prosecutions and trained a generation of practitioners who carried the method forward.

8. Liberman, Jacob. Take Off Your Glasses and See: A Mind/Body Approach to Expanding Your Eyesight and Insight, 1995. See also his earlier Light: Medicine of the Future, 1991.

9. Cowan, Thomas S. “Cataract: An Essay on Light, Poison, and the Wisdom of Opacity.” Unbekoming, February 2026. The earlier companion essay examining what the cataract itself is in terrain terms.