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Dr. Schneider has helped thousands of people to see better. (Self-Healing.org)
A doctor friend of mine used to tell me that medicine is like religion for many doctors. She wasn’t talking about surgeons with God-complexes. Or even the reverence that a white coat and stethoscope induces in many. Until I started writing about alternative health, I didn’t really know what she meant.
If you go into your local opticians and ask them if there is any way that you can improve your vision, chances are they’ll laugh at you. Optometrists believe that in adults visual fitness can’t be improved. Vision can deteriorate. It doesn’t get better.
Fifty-six-year-old Meir Schneider should be someone that any optician with a keen, enquiring scientific mind should be eager to meet. He was born blind to deaf parents.
Five traumatic operations during childhood to correct his congenital cataracts went wrong and left him with scarred lenses. Over the years, doctors and optometrists told him that his vision would never improve. But he was sure that one day he would be able to see well.
The Bates Method
In his late teens, Schneider heard about W. H. Bates, an American ophthalmologist. He devised a system of eye exercises and techniques in the early 1900s. Meir devoted himself to following the Bates method. He did sunning, palming, and visualization and memory exercises. The British Bates Association website seeing.org has some interesting vision games, which anyone can try.
Today, Dr. Meir Schneider can see well enough to have been granted a non-restricted driver’s license in the United States. He has a doctorate in anatomy and a school for self-healing in San Francisco, which specializes in massage, movement, and vision improvement. Schneider credits himself with helping thousands of people to see better, to recover from injury, to overcome paralysis, and to prevent many problems. He is now training others to do the same.
Optometrists, ophthalmic surgeons, and opticians who have examined his eyes with and without an auto-refractor are shocked. The auto-refractor measures how light travels through the eye and the amount of light that reaches the back of the eye. This will determine your prescription. Because of his scarred lenses, only a tiny fraction of light can go through to Schneider’s retina. According to conventional theories, Schneider is still blind. Yet he can see well enough to read and drive without glasses.
He is proof that, contrary to popular belief, a diagnosis of visual impairment isn’t necessarily an indicator of visual acuity.
Some top ophthalmologists have come forward to praise Schneider’s methods and said that his ideas need to be re-thought.
Meir is adamant that everything that he’s done for his eyes is repeatable.
“The trouble is that people don’t have the support that they need when they want to do some work on their vision. They need a little guidance.”
There are a small number of highly trained Bates teachers in the U.K. and the United States.
Narrow Vision of Opthalmology and Optometry
Many professionals with training in ophthalmology and in optometry say that they have spent little time looking into natural vision improvement.
Geoff Roberson of the Association of Optometrists explains why the Bates method is only taught in passing.
“We don’t believe that there’s any scientific basis to it. If there was any real benefit to the Bates technique, we would all be using it.”
“Because in the 1800s the fathers of ophthalmology made up their minds about how the eye works,” Meir explains. They thought that the eye is like a static camera, and vision works eye to brain. According to Bates, vision is much more complex than that.
Myer told this author: “It’s up to people like you to help me get the message out. Engaging with the industry has been fruitless.
“What we do is provide physiotherapy for the eye. Opticians don’t want to have to re-write all of their books. Would you like to think that you spent four years at university learning theories that weren’t right, and that you spend your professional lives giving patients the wrong advice?”
Meir Schneider’s latest book “Movement for Self-Healing” is available from Amazon.com. His website is Self-Healing.org
Mastoor Khan is a freelance writer with an interest in preventive health issues.
