Medicine: The Eyes Have It

“Don’t sit so close to the TV—you’ll ruin your sight.” “Hold that book farther away from your eyes!””Stop drawing in the dark! You’ll go blind.” Such commands and warnings are screamed out millions of times a day, and they are all wrong, an ophthalmologist told the American Medical Association at its Denver meeting last week.

From more than 20 years of practice in the Mile-High City, said Dr. Morris Kaplan, he has developed a series of set speeches for parents, and grandparents, to disabuse them of the all-too-common fallacies about eyes, vision and glasses. Key points:

·USE THEM. “The best way for your child to keep his eyes healthy (whether or not he wears glasses) is to use them. The more he reads, the more he writes, the more he watches television, and the more he goes to the movies, the better it will be for his eyes.”

·DISTANCE DOESN’T MATTER. “It makes no difference how close the child holds his reading material. While holding a book close may be evidence of early myopia, it is not doing any damage and is certainly not causing the myopia.”

·UPSIDE-DOWN Is O.K. “As far as the eyes are concerned, it matters not whether your child is sitting down or lying down, or is upside down or under the bed covers while he is doing this reading. I am not advocating that he read in the dark—it is obviously more comfortable and perhaps easier to read in adequate light—but it does no harm to the eyes to read in the dark. I would much prefer that your child read upside down in the dark than not read at all.”

·TV Is GREAT. “In my serious medical opinion, television is a particularly beneficial type of eye exercise, and I urge my patients to watch it as much as possible. Many people prefer to be close to the instrument for comfort, and that is where those people should sit. Some prefer to sit across the room and that is where they should sit. To insist that a child move away from the screen because that is where an adult prefers to sit may be enough to give him a headache and bring on nausea and vomiting.”

·MOVIES ARE FINE. “Movies are in the same category. If your child wants to go to the movies at one o’clock on Saturday and come out at six, having sat in the front row the whole time, that’s fine. He may have a splitting headache and be sick from a lot of popcorn, but he has caused no harm to his eyes. He has benefited from using them. Eyes, like fingers, hands, arms, feet, legs, brains and lungs are to be used, and lack of use may do much greater harm than use. People who tell me they are ‘saving’ their eyes by not using them are doing their eyes a major disservice.”

There is such a thing as eyestrain, Dr. Kaplan conceded, and he defined it as “the sum of the discomforts from overuse or from uncorrected (by glasses) defects of the focusing powers of the eyes”-fatigue of the focusing muscles. Such discomforts, he insisted, cannot damage the organs of sight. If anybody wants to leave his glasses off, that is all right with the permissive Dr. Kaplan, even though “the patient may not see well without them and may consequently fall down steps and break a leg.” But that is a problem for the orthopedist, not for the ophthalmologist.