The World Is Going Blind. Taiwan Offers a Warning, and a Cure
22nd August 2023
When Wu began his surgical career in the late 1990s, most of his patients were in their sixties or seventies. But in the mid-2000s, he started to notice a troubling change. The people on his operating table kept getting younger. In 2016, Wu performed a scleral buckle surgery—fastening a belt around the eye to fix the retina into place—on a 14-year-old girl, a student at an elite high school in Kaohsiung. Another patient, a prominent programmer who had worked for Yahoo, suffered two severe retinal detachments and was blind in both eyes by age 29. Both of these cases are part of a wider problem that’s been growing across Asia for decades and is rapidly becoming an issue in the West too: an explosion of myopia.
I spent most of my life with myopia–I cannot remember a time when I didn’t wear glasses. When RK became available, I jumped on it (although I now wish I’d waited; Lasik doesn’t leave the same scars in its wake). That gave me about ten years of glorious life without glasses, and I enjoyed every minute of it.
For economies to continuously expand, education had to become central, and as this happened, the rates of myopia started to climb.
I wouldn’t go so far as to say that education and myopia have a causal relationship, but it certainly seems suspicious. Of the three of us children to survived to adulthood, the two who were compulsive readers and eventually college graduates were extremely myopic, and the other–first born, in 1944–was never a heavy reader and never went to college.
HERE IS A non-exhaustive list of things that have been blamed for nearsightedness: pregnancy, pipe smoking, brown hair, long heads, bulging eyes, too much fluid in the eyes, not enough fluid in the eyes, muscle spasms, social class. “Any ophthalmologist who experienced a night of insomnia arose in the morning with a new and usually more bizarre theory,” wrote Brian Curtin in an influential 1985 book about myopia.
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Morgan and his team also surveyed the participants about their daily routines and hobbies and discovered a surprising relationship. The more time kids spent outside, the less likely they were to have myopia.