How to Maintain Good Vision Amidst the Myopia Epidemic
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The article discusses ways to maintain good vision amidst the myopia epidemic, and the discussion revolves around the causes of myopia, effectiveness of various treatments, and personal experiences with vision correction.
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Nov 9, 2025 at 8:20 PM EST
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Most are in fact measured in feet, and only quite a few at that. Still better than being measured in centimeters however.
Viture glasses ship with adjustable myopia optical correction to -5.00D (no cylinder), or they have an optional frame for custom prescriptions.
You can replicate those light levels indoors, if you're bloody minded enough to do so. It's somewhat expensive but for a tech-enabled crowd not too difficult.
You need about 10x to 100x the lighting most people are satisfied with indoors, and you need to turn it on whenever you're in the room and leave it on between sunrise and sunset. This is easiest with timers and automation.
The most important thing about all of this is to realize that children NEED outdoor recess sometime between the hours of 10am and 2pm every day. They don't have to be directly exposed to the sun, but they need to be in an environment with >1000 lux, more is generally better, for a number of hours. This will prevent their growing eyes from continuing to grow indefinitely.
We know this because there was an intervention in Taiwan, which has extremely high myopia levels in children (80%+ last I heard), and it dropped myopia from ~80% to ~35% in the intervention group. That's an astounding effectiveness for something free.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29371008/
https://reviewofmm.com/light-as-a-tool-for-myopia-control/
I can't find the site that I read a while ago, it was very similar to the myticker.com site that was posted the other day for heart disease but focused on myopia.
I also found this Guardian article from a Google search: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/mar/01/shortsighted-t...
The only thing that makes me hesitant is the extreme unpleasantness of direct high brightness artificial light. I wonder if an indirect lighting setup of similar brightness could be as effective.
This guy has a pretty compelling version:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6bqBsHSwPgw
If you look at his scatter pane, that's where I would go. There are companies that sell similar lights retail, but they're perhaps 3x as expensive.
Also... 100x the lighting indoors strikes me as quite difficult? Do you have any examples of a realistic setup?
I really like this video for an example of how to make proper scattering effect, but you can buy similar materials that are more durable and lighter, for in e.g. a drop ceiling:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6bqBsHSwPgw
I completely believe him when he says that it feels like sunlight (it's a high-quality, high-CRI, extremely bright light source at infinity!) but us humans are very bad at determining brightness levels. An iPhone flashlight in your face is unpleasantly bright and yet it is a completely insignificant amount of light on an absolute scale. We humans perceive brightness on a sort of relative log scale.
The steelman argument - where someone does indeed build one 500W water-cooled setup with large dish etc - and all of this light falls into a small corner of 2m x 2m - is still only ~5000 lux, roughly an overcast day. To even get to the level of standing in the shade on a clear day - 20k lux - for a regular room, you would need an obscenely powerful setup.
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The natural response to my comment, of course, is that "well, maybe they don't need those high levels!" The problem is that all of the research indicates that they do. You mention research on Taiwan, which I think is a perfect example. They already did try to brighten the indoors to prevent myopia - minimum government standard of 500 lux starting with a 1999 standard [1], and in many cases brighter than that. You say that they need a 1000 lux environment, which isn't much different than the current Taiwanese indoors. I, on the other hand, say they need a ~100k lux environment, which is orders of magnitude more light. The research agrees with me: it was not the 500 lux standard, but the later introduction of two hours outdoors daily that improved myopia rates [1,2.]
Mind you, this is two hours outdoors during school hours in Taiwan, which is near the Tropic of Cancer (think Mexico, Caribbean, North Africa) and thus has far sunnier winters (Taiwanese peak summer sun is 1.9x winter sun vs 4.2x in Boston, 3.7x in NYC, 10x in London [4]) despite total solar irradiation being similar to Western cities [3.]
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016164202...
[2] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34425129/
[3] https://solargis.com/resources/free-maps-and-gis-data?locali...
[4] https://weatherspark.com/y/137170/Average-Weather-in-Taipei-...
One way to test it out would be the rates of myopia of people from lower latitudes that have migrated to the nordics.
Does that mean that populations in places with more sunlight (e.g. close to the equator) have less myopia than populations with less (e.g. close to the arctic)?
https://nap.nationalacademies.org/read/27734/chapter/5#29
And I'm the only one who doesn't wear glasses, lol
Most of my professional life has been spent staring at screens, usually in darkened rooms, so I have no idea why my sight is still good.
Normally, the brain adapts to the warping, and it also means (as I didn't notice before the doc told me) that I have a tendency to turn my head rather than turn my eyes.
But with the "warp" constantly changing, the brain cannot adapt to it and it calculates the wrong trajectory for a flying object.
Hence my utter failure at hitting baseballs and tennis balls.
The doc opened by saying "you must be bad at baseball!", guessing correctly, and then explained all this to me. He also said I must suffer from severe headaches because of it, and accused me of lying about it when I denied it(!).
Contact lenses solve the problem by moving with your eye, but I tried them and didn't like the nuisance of contacts. (This is not an issue if you have only near or far sightedness.) I could get Lasik eye surgery, but I don't even want to take a small risk of damaging my eyes.
It's one of the more annoying things about getting older, if you didn't need glasses before sometime in your 40's.
Vision therapy: https://raygottlieb.com/presbyopia
Expensive progressive glasses have neurological impact, not just optical. Better to use separate distance and reading glasses which manipulate only optics, and provide the brain with a physical signal of "mode" change.
We do need studies on if/why/how myopia reduction works for some people.
However, we already know a guaranteed way to increase myopia:
This loop can be broken by measuring the distance in #5 and buying dedicated lens/contacts for that distance. This reduces the burden on both eye and brain.As a matter of fact I'm using glasses I bought this way right now. I actually find these even more comfortable than my full degree glasses for all-day use too, in terms of eye strain.
I feel it's ridiculous that the medical industry thinks I need to wear glasses that are powerful enough to focus an image of a mountain 100 kms away all day, when my average focus distance throughout the day is probably less than one meter.
These reduced degree glasses are called differentials. If you want to go into the rabbit hole of fixing your myopia, start here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XPIGDSY_xBs
Disclaimer: When driving, you have to obviously wear your full prescription glasses.
That being said I'm even less sure how to calculate it now.
My understanding is that eye strain is either caused by unbalanced lightning (e.g. bright screen in dark room), or focusing on close distance for too long without giving the muscles a break by focusing further away. The well known 20-20-20 rule tries to establish that. As a practical advice, you may try adding some small walks, getting some fresh air for a few minutes, or even looking out of the window for a few minutes throughout the day.
FYI, iPhones have a feature to tell you to use your phone further away when you use it glued to your face. If you have myopia, it should go without saying that you should never use your phone with your glasses.
Apple could detect that the user is wearing glasses. During FaceID registration, the phone could ask whether the glasses are for distance (myopia) or closeup/reading. If distance, the phone could offer to remind the user to remove their glasses after using the phone for more than X minutes.
Ask optician to customize the intermediate/computer glasses for your work posture, e.g. looking straight ahead (monitor) or down (laptop).
For those with more time than money, learn from opticians at https://www.optiboard.com/forums/ before ordering online.
You can also order 0.75 diopter glasses on Amazon that work real well.
Low ambient lighting and dark mode for work will increase pupil dilation and reduce focus. Better to match monitor brightness with natural ambient light levels.
Vision therapists are better at personalized treatment, https://locate.covd.org
It's worth trying to reduce myopia, if only to reduce the thickness/weight of glasses, https://hn.algolia.com/?query=walterbell%20myopia&sort=byDat...
As long as you get a few hours outdoors most days during childhood, it doesn't really matter (from the perspective of myopia prevention) if you spend your indoor time in front of a screen or not. And if you don't get that outdoor time, avoiding screens won't save you from myopia. Screens are not really relevant here except to the extent that they encourage children to spend less time outside. You could just as easily blame HVAC or other conveniences of modern homes that make it nicer to stay inside.
Here is an example one; there are likely dozens available.
Study with 65 citations: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7607527/
Pop science article with more context: https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/05/nearsight... (https://archive.is/OeuC3)
And again I am skeptical of claims that it is just one factor like brightness alone. There is other research about spectrum and distant objects in view that also shows effects. So even if you did use 100x brighter lights in your house there's no guarantee you would fix the problem.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9114237/
I did nerdy kid stuff like read lots of books and use computer screens (uncommon back then, I'm 52)... but I also played outdoors for hours nearly every single day.
Ended up with vision at -6.00 by the time I was a young teenager (don't remember the age it started to slide that way but would estimate around 7-8 or so). Hasn't gotten any worse (or better) since then.
I had an incredible childhood with building hidden dwellings in the woods, unsupervised fires and bicycle journeys, football, building ice castles etc, swimming and martial arts lessons. My parents even limited my TV time to 2h a day.
But I still had —1 myopia for every grade until 7th.
My analysis is that by that time I got into reading books - both science and fantasy, and then boom my eyesight was fucked.
Thank god for LASIK.
When I became a heavy reader I speedran long sighted to short sighted. I think 4th grade I got my long sighted diagnosis. 5th grade I started lifting heavier books. By the end of 7th I had more or less the prescription for Myopia I have now.
My eye doctor said it was my eyes optimizing for what they do the most. And that makes sense, I have no eye strain using a computer.
Interestingly my vision is better in the summer, and when I take holidays during the summer and spent time away from the computer my eyes essentially fix themselves. It takes a couple months back behind a screen to need my glasses again.
Are you conflating retina with eyeball? In some/many cases, it’s the length of the eyeball being too long for correct focus on the retina. The retina doesn’t keep growing and cause myopia.