It’s called Ortho-K, or Orthokeratology, and involves wearing special contact lenses while you sleep, to correct the curvature of the eye. When you wake up the next morning and take out the lenses, you have perfect vision throughout the day.
Here is more. When I ponder the possibility of laser eye surgery, I start calculating the probability of a sudden Virginia earthquake. I’m now at the point where I need glasses for more than half of my reading material. I don’t mind the look but it slows me down ever so slightly…
Perhaps you should be daring and simply have the laser surgery performed in, say, St. Louis.
The CaseWatch article about deceptive claims is from 1998: according to Wikipedia, FDA approval of the technique began in 2002.
Claims of “cure” were at issue: orthokeratology is supposedly palliative at best.
I used orhto-k back in 1982. I was at the Air Force Academy trying to improve my eyesight so I could go to pilot training. It did work but the results were short lived. And the hard contacts were painful. I have not worn contacts since.
Tyler, Flynn, and the rest of you. It’s been a long day as I read these posts but good grief. You are no Luddite trying to prevent others from enjoying better contacts by being a sabot-teur. You are reflective (see Dewey, not refractive) learner. In looking before you leap you are trying to gain a worthwhile cognitive distance between someone telling you “yeah, go ahead and do it” — an advertised cure– and the caution that comes from experience– your instinctive “now wait one minute.” This is amplified by the psychological attachment we have to our senses (give people a choice between blindness or amputation or a long prison sentence and they choose prison every time.) Your long view of the issue tells you to be careful about short term choices. Possible damage vs. ‘wait and see’ is a clear cost benefit choice.
Ok, I’m out of puns.
(Now, on a different issue which has no merit- he says he’s concerned about an earthquake and you suggest he go get help near the New Madrid fault!?)
I suspect Patrick is right, in the case of both ortho- and radial-k. If you are growing farsighted, you are probably stuck with specs. For now, figuring out whether Patrick is right is probably your most profitable avenue of research.
I agree with eric, you aren’t a Luddite.
The Luddites destroyed technology that they thought was destroying jobs. More generally today Ludditism is used to describe similar beliefs, namely that technology is bad for us one way or another.
Some technologies are indeed bad for us, or are bad is misused. Call them neo-leaches if you want, something that people beleive is helpful but instead hurts. There is nothing backwards or stupid or neanderthalic about personally looking before you leap, or watching how others land after leaping before you choose to leap.
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