We often talk about medical blind spots. Medicine has blind spots – but what are they? The simplest example: a cold gets better in 7 days if you see a doctor and take medicine, and it also gets better in 7 days if you don’t. Can you see the blind spot?
Medical journals around the world publish 2 million papers every year, yet 50% to 70% of research results are never made public, hiding negative and harmful information about treatments.
20% to 40% of patients receive treatments that do little or nothing for them. If medicine has blind spots, does eye care have them too? It certainly does – the eye is the most delicate organ in the human body, with the most capillaries and nerves, and the only organ that turns light into images.
It is more complex than any other organ in our body. Its dozens of parts are all closely linked, so when something goes wrong it can be almost impossible to tell which part is responsible – which is why misdiagnosis, wrong treatment, wrong prescriptions and failed surgery are so common.
Let’s look at some of the accepted “facts” in eye care: once the eyeball grows longer it never shrinks back, so myopia is irreversible. Once astigmatism goes up, it never comes down. Dry eye needs long-term moisturising treatment. Myopia and presbyopia always get worse every year. Optic nerve damage cannot be repaired. Floaters only multiply. Strabismus can only be corrected with surgery. There is still no effective solution for lazy eye. High eye pressure can only be lowered with eye drops.
Glaucoma cannot be cured. Lost visual field cannot be restored. Pterygium can only wait to be removed. Ptosis can only be treated with surgery. Cataracts must be left to worsen until surgery is needed. Can you believe it? Even for the most common minor eye problems – dry eye and floaters – medicine has yet to find a breakthrough. Eye problems must be solved by strengthening the eye as a whole, never by treating each symptom on its own.
This is a century-old challenge and a problem of our time. If medicine cannot make the breakthrough, we have to change course and look to technology instead. 12 years ago, the Hong Kong Bright Action Foundation invested in developing cutting-edge medical eyewear. It achieved the breakthrough it hoped for and overcame several medical blind spots – not only preventing and controlling eye problems effectively, but aiming to reverse them.
Over the past ten years, more than 5,000 success stories and positive clinical results have brought good news to thousands of people with vision problems who had nowhere else to turn – and helped society tackle the vision problems of our time.