> A few years ago I found a technique on youtube to help myopia by wearing slightly lower prescription glasses.

That is not physically possible.

Maybe (and that's a big concession, I'm very skeptical) it could work with kids, with still-developing eyes. No amount of glasses trickery will reshape your cornea in adulthood.

Other than the physical world constraints, if this hypothesis was true, people's myopia would never progress, as you would, by definition, be wearing lower prescription glasses if this happened, so it would self-correct.

The only thing this will get you is a headache.

I don't know if it works with kids.

I'm a programmer, I look at the computer monitor probably about 8 hours per day. What I did was that I wear a glass with weaker prescription so that when I look at the computer monitor, the characters are slightly blurred but I can still read them. I did this for about 6 month and my prescription went from -5.75, -5.25 to -4.75, -4.25. Actually when I started even with the -5.75, -5.25 prescription my vision is about 1.2 or so.

Unfortunately this technique seems to only work at the beginning. In the months following the first 6 months my vision didn't improve anymore so I stopped it. But I consider spending $300 to knock off 1 point prescription from each eye quite worth it.

By the way I never got any headache from wearing weaker prescription glasses (and I did get headache before when wearing stronger prescription glasses). Actually I found it comfortable to wear weaker prescription glasses when reading, because my eyes don't feel stressed. That is actually the optometrist at Costo suggested to me.

It works for some people, not others. Reasons unclear, but there is published research which explores this topic at length, especially with techniques that can be monetized, such as special contact lens for myopia treatment. In some Asian countries, it is a national health/economic priority due to high prevalence of myopia.

For anyone curious, the actual link is zennioptical.com

Is this technique a real thing?

Can we get an expert's opinion?

I'm not an expert, but I researched it a bit online since I found a charlatan who was promising people they could get rid of glasses completely.

Expert opinion is that this is not possible, myopia is a physical condition that cannot be reversed easily. It is possible to get used slightly weaker lenses, but this is mostly your brain learning to adjust to the slight fuzziness. This seems in line with what tianmingwu experienced.

> cannot be reversed easily

Do you mean via some kind of therapy or intervention, or in general?

I had pretty severe myopia 30 years ago, bad enough that I needed glasses in order to legally drive. But it steadily has gotten better, without any treatment. I stopped needing glasses to drive about 15 years ago, and now I have nearly perfect vision.

EDIT: I searched around a bit and indeed it seems that the consensus is that myopia never natural improves with age. But...whatever was causing my poor distance eyesight in the 1980s slowly got better. DMV records (granted, not high precision data) demonstrate it. So I don't know what to say.

How old were you? Up to a certain age, your refractive power may change(in either direction). Doctors will often not perform LASIK until you have proven that your prescription has stabilized for a while.

My vision was at its worst when I was in my mid 20s. It's steadily improved since then.

My eye doctors have always told me that we get far-sighted as we age, so if you were near-sighted to begin with, then the aging process is correcting it. In another 20 years I would expect that you might start needing glasses again to drive.

I think whatever causes people with normal vision to become farsighted as they age also causes nearsighted people (or at least some of us) to become less nearsighted over time. It seems to be happening to me, though only slightly.

Is that EndMyopia / BackTo2020? I signed up for the "email intro" just to see what it's about, but it's really just a bunch of breathless testimonials and random references saying that you should wear slightly less strong glasses than your prescription.

He's basically trying to get people to pay $99 for a forum to talk about the same stuff.

The TL;DR for his program seems to be that glasses cause myopia to worsen, especially wearing distance glasses for close-up work. Might have something to it, but not $99 for.

There's a free facebook group with hundreds if not thousands of posts with vision improvement stories. No money needed. But vision improvement takes way more effort/time/motivation than the average person can muster.