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Self-help programs of eye exercises to improve vision come and go, and you can always find someone offering them (usually for a fee) online.
Typically, these programs - which claim to reduce or eliminate your need for glassesand contacts - produce no significant or lasting improvement in your vision, and some could be potentially harmful to your eyes and your safety.
History of eye exercises to improve vision
Eye exercises to improve vision have been around since the 1920s, when maverick ophthalmologist William Horatio Bates, MD, created a program of eye exercises that became known as the Bates Method.
The Bates Method has never been proven effective in providing significant or lasting vision improvement. Also, some activities recommended by Bates - including "sunning" (exposing the eyes to direct sunlight) and "palming" (covering the closed eyes with the palms of the hands) could potentially be damaging to the eyes.
Most modern programs of eye exercises to improve vision are based (at least in part) on the Bates Method.
Some programs of eye exercises also recommend personal affirmations to make you feel your vision is improving. For example, you might repeatedly say to yourself, "I'm seeing better each day," or, "I can see without my glasses."
Self-help eye exercise programs usually claim they can reduce refractive errors such as nearsightedness and astigmatism, as well as presbyopia.
Before you spend time and money on anything that promises you will be able to "throw away your glasses," be aware that these programs are highly controversial and often there is little or no scientific evidence that shows they work.
In fact, several popular eye exercise programs - including one recent popular eye exercises program called the See Clearly Method (which in some ways resembled parts of the Bates Method) - have been removed from the marketplace for making false claims about their effectiveness.
Can eye exercises change your eyes?
To better understand if eye exercises that promise "natural vision improvement" can actually reduce refractive errors, you need to consider eye anatomy and how the eye refracts light.
Problems with how the eye is shaped typically contribute to focusing errors such as nearsightedness, farsightedness(hyperopia) and astigmatism. For example:
When the eyeball is too short, you are farsighted and can't focus on near objects because light rays entering your eye achieve a point of focus somewhere beyond your retina.
When you are nearsighted and your eyeball is too long, light rays have too far to go and "fall short" of achieving a point of focus on your retina.
When you have astigmatism, usually your cornea has an irregular shape, causing light rays entering your eye to split into different points of focus, creating blurry vision.
Another common vision problem, presbyopia, occurs with aging when your eye's natural lens starts to lose elasticity and no longer can move properly to focus on close-up objects. This condition typically causes your near vision to start blurring, beginning at around age 40.
Eye exercises typically make you move your eye muscles to create up-and-down, side-to-side or circular motions and make you change your point of focus to different distances.
So if you are considering an eye exercise program to improve your vision, ask yourself these questions:
Will exercising your eyes change the basic shape of your eyeball, by making it longer or shorter?
Will eye exercises alter the basic shape of your cornea, and change the angle of how light rays enter your eye to achieve focus?
If you have astigmatism, will exercising your eyes somehow reshape your eye's irregular surface?
If you have presbyopia, will eye exercises restore your eye's lens to its once youthful elasticity that has declined due to natural aging processes?
Also, it's very important to consider this: Are you putting yourself and others at risk (especially when driving) because you're not seeing as well as you think you are?

Do eye exercises work?
A recent review of research published in peer-reviewed, scientific journals conducted by AllAboutVision.com failed to uncover any studies showing that eye exercises can alter the eye's basic anatomy significantly or eliminate presbyopia - which no one escapes after a certain age.
Eye exercise programs occupy a nebulous space somewhere between medical science and folk remedy. Most optometrists and ophthalmologists are dismissive of eye exercise programs that promise you can "throw away your glasses" due to lack of scientific proof of their effectiveness.
Still, these unproven programs of "miracle" eye exercises can be found on the Internet - along with conspiracy theories alleging that optometrists and ophthalmologists know the "truth" about benefits of eye exercises but won't tell their patients because they then wouldn't be able to sell eyeglasses, contact lenses and eye surgery.
(Claims like these illustrate the importance of considering the