Bates Method Health Article

Definition

The Bates method, popularized in the early twentieth century by ophthalmologist William Horatio Bates, involves the use of therapeutic eye exercises. Bates claims these exercises will correct vision problems, thus alleviating the need for glasses or contact lenses. Patients practice eye exercises aimed at strengthening and training their eye muscles in an effort to overcome such problems as farsightedness (hyperopia), nearsightedness (myopia), and astigmatism.

Origins

The method was devised by Bates, who was born in 1860 in Newark, New Jersey. In 1885, he received his medical degree and began practicing in New York City. Over the years, he began to notice that eye conditions like myopia, which is caused by a refractive error, could become better or worse for no apparent reason. Based on this observation, he began to question a basic tenet of traditional ophthalmology, which held that once a person had a refractive error like myopia, the only way to correct it was by wearing glasses.

While traditional ophthalmologists believed that the lens was responsible for the eye's focus, Bates maintained that it was the muscles around the eye that caused the eye to focus. Thus, traditional ophthalmologists blamed problems like nearsightedness on a failure of the lens to properly focus, while Bates believed it was due to a dysfunction of the muscles surrounding the eyeball. Bates had come to this conclusion after performing eye surgery on cataract patients and finding that some of them could still see distance without glasses even though he had removed the lens from their eyes; therefore, he determined that the lens did not play a role in refractive errors such as myopia.

At this point, Bates broke from his counterparts and began focusing his attention on the muscles surrounding the eye. He came to view eye problems as a result of poor evolution, believing that the eye had not kept up with human progress and had not evolved to allow reading. He also blamed problems on artificial light, which kept the eyes working longer hours each day than they were intended to. Bates developed a series of eye exercises to retrain the optic muscles to solve this evolutionary glitch.

Bates believed that eye strain caused vision to deteriorate, and his treatment was simple: like any other muscles, the eye muscles need periods of rest and exercise in order to achieve optimal performance. He focused on the functioning of the six small muscles that control the eye's shape. When they become tense, they gradually grow weak and result in nearsightedness, farsightedness, astigmatism, or "lazy eye."

The Bates method received acclaim several years after Bates's death (1931), when author Aldous Huxley boasted that after two months on the Bates program, he went from being almost blind to being able to read without wearing glasses.