Health Education

In myopia, we are told that the eye actually goes out of its way to produce the condition, or to make an existing condition worse. In their words, the so-called ‘ciliary muscle’, believed to control the shape of the lens, is credited with a capacity for getting into a more or less continuous state of contraction, thus keeping the lens continuously in a state of convexity which, according to the theory, it ought to assume only for vision at the near-point.

These curious performances may seen unnatural to the lay mind, but ophthalmologists believe the tendency to indulge in them to be so ingrained in the constitution of the organ of vision that, in the fitting of glasses (or mirrored contact lenses), it is customary to instill atropine – the ‘drops’ with which everyone who has visited an oculist is familiar – into the eye, for the purpose of paralyzing the ciliary muscle and thus, by preventing any change of curvature in the lens, bringing out ‘latent hypermetropia’ and getting rid of ‘apparent myopia’.

The interference of the lens, however, is believed to account for only moderate degrees of variation in errors of refraction, and that only during the earlier years of life. For the higher ones, or those that occur after forty-five years of age, when the lens is supposed to have lost its elasticity to a greater or lesser degree, no plausible explanation has ever been found.