Een aantal citaten uit Perfect sight without glasses van William Horatio Bates over staar:


“As has already been noted, the fact that after the removal of the lens for cataract the eye often appears to accommodate just as well as it did before is well known. Many of these cases have come under my own observation. Such patients have not only read diamond type with only their distance glasses on, at thirteen and ten inches and at a less distance, but one man was able to read without any glass at all. ”

“It has been demonstrated in thousands of cases that all abnormal action of the external muscles of the ; eyeball is accompanied by a strain or effort to see, and that with the relief of this strain the action of the muscles becomes normal and all errors of refraction disappear. The eye may be blind, it may be suffering from atrophy of the optic nerve, from cataract, or disease of the retina; but so long as it does not try to see, the external muscles act normally and there is no error of refraction. This fact furnishes us with the means by which all these conditions, so long held to be incurable, may be cured.”

“The strain that produces an error of refraction is not the same as the strain that produces a squint, or a cataract, or glaucoma, or amblyopia, or inflammation of the conjunctiva4 or of the margin of the lids, or disease of the optic nerve or retina. All these conditions may exist with only a slight error of refraction, and while the relief of one strain usually means the relief of any others that may coexist with it, it sometimes happens that the strain associated with such conditions as cataract and glaucoma is relieved without the complete relief of the strain that causes the error of refraction.”

“Not only do all errors of refraction and all functional disturbances of the eye disappear when it sees by central fixation, but many organic conditions are relieved or cured. I am unable to set any limits to its possibilities. I would not have ventured to predict that glaucoma, incipient cataract and syphilitic iritis could be cured by central fixation; but It is a fact that these conditions have disappeared when central fixation was attained.”

Bates over staar

“Patients who succeed with palming from the beginning are to be congratulated, for they are always cured very quickly. A very remarkable case of this kind was that of a man nearly seventy years of age with compound hypermetropic astigmatism and presbyopia, complicated by incipient cataract. For more than forty years he had worn glasses to improve his distant vision, and for twenty years he had worn them for reading and desk work. Because of the cloudiness of the lens, he had now become unable to see well enough to do his work, even with glasses; and the other physicians whom he had consulted had given him no hope of relief except by operation when the cataract was ripe. When he found palming helped him, he asked:
“Can I do that too much?”
“No,” he was told. “Palming is simply a means of resting your eyes, and you cannot rest them too much.”
A few days later he returned and said:
“Doctor, it was tedious, very tedious; but I did it.”
“What was tedious?” I asked.
“Palming,” he replied. “I did it continuously for twenty hours.”
“But you couldn’t have kept it up for twenty hours continuously,” I said incredulously. “You must have stopped to eat.”
And then he related that from four o’clock in the morning until twelve at night he had eaten nothings only drinking large quantities of water, and had devoted practically all of the time to palming. It must have been tedious, as he said, but it was also worth while. When he looked at the test card, without glasses, he read the bottom line at twenty feet. He also read fine print at six inches and at twenty. The cloudiness of the lens had become much less, and in the center had entirely disappeared. Two years later there had been no relapse.”

“In the same classroom, there had been a little girl with congenital cataract, but on the occasion of my visit the defect had disappeared. This, too, it appeared, was Emily’s doing. The school doctor had said that there was no help for this eye except through operation, and as the sight of the other eye was pretty good, he fortunately did not think it necessary to urge such a course. Emily accordingly took the matter in hand. She had the patient stand close to the card, where, with the good eye covered, she was unable to see even the big C. Emily now held the card between the patient and the light, and moved it back and forth. At a distance of three or four feet this movement could be observed indistinctly by the patient. The card was then moved farther away, until the patient became able to see it move at ten feet and to see some of the larger letters indistinctly at a less distance. Finally; after six months, she became able to read the card with the bad eye as well as with the good one. After testing her sight and finding it normal in both eyes…..”

“One case who has a partial cataract of the left eye could not see anything on the Snellen test card at twenty feet, and could see the letters only faintly at ten feet. Now she, can read 20/10 with both eyes together, and also with each eye separately; but the left eye seems, as she says, to be looking through a little fog. I could cite many other cases that have been benefited by central fixation, but this one is the most interesting to me.”


En dan last but surely not least een citaat van Bates over staar uit zijn Better Eyesight magazines, juni 1920:
“The treatment was prescribed as follows:
Palming six times a day, a half hour or longer at a time.
Reading the Snellen test card at five, ten, and twenty feet.
Reading fine print at six inches, five minutes at a time, especially soon after rising in teh morning an just before retiring at night, and reading books and newspapers.
Besides this, he was to subject his eyes, especially the left, to the sunlight whenever an opportunity offered, to drink twelve glasses of water a day, walk five miles a day and later, when he was in better training, to run half a mile or so every day.
The results of this treatment have been most gratifying. Not only have his eyes improved steadily, but his general health has been so much benefited that at eighty-two he looks, acts and feels better and younger then he did at eighty-one.”

Een ander artikel van Bates over Cataract, in het engels.