Perhaps more than any other body part, doctors act as though eyes have a life of their own, disconnected from the rest of our bodies. The medical profession tends to view eye problems as purely mechanical, a retina that somehow got detached, a globe that somehow got misshapen or stubbornly refuses to stay straight or see correctly, a bad toss of the dice that has somehow, without our having anything to do with it, "just happened".Consequently, the prevailing medical approach is to surgically or chemically get those errant lenses or muscles back into line that is, to correct vision by attempting to treat the symptoms, not the underlying cause. In most cases, the underlying cause isn't understood and certainly never connected to our diet or any other drugs we may be taking.

But at least one doctor in the UK takes issue with this approach. Stanley Evans went to Africa in 1964 for an extended research programme into the causes and prevention of blindness in Africa. He planned to stay five years and ended up staying 17, during which time he completed a great deal of research into the nutritional causes and correction of eye disease. Evans has countless anecdotal cases of patients in Africa and Britain (and indeed from many other countries) who have been helped or cured through his dietary and orthoptic (ie, eye exercises) approach. Here is his view of the dangers of some orthodox treatments and the basic nutritional regimen he recommends. Read it and weep.

Glaucoma

Glaucoma, one of the leading causes of blindness in the UK, is a disease where eye pressure, due to an obstruction in the outflow of the aqueous humour, becomes elevated, eventually damaging the optic nerve. The orthodox methods of treating glaucoma fall under the following categories:

Surgical methods may be adopted if the tension within the eye is very high and drugs fail to reduce it to a safe level within a few hours. (If high tension is allowed to persist for 12 hours, permanent damage is almost certain to occur.) Sometimes this operation is often performed as an alternative to drugs.

Drug based methods consist of one or more of the following:

A miotic such as pilocarpine given as drops into the eye to constrict the pupil and stimulate the ciliary muscle.

Acarbonic anhydrase inhibitor such as Diamox or Daranide to inhibit secretions and thereby reduce the production rate of the aqueous humour.

Administration of an osmotic agent such as Mannitol (Osmitrol) to aid the aqueous outflow.

Recently a new experimental medical method is to use timolol maleate as an eyedrop. This is an antihypertensive similar in action to propranolol hydrochloride. Special reporting is required when this is prescribed as there are a number of serious side effects from this type of drug, some lethal. It is known to cause "dry eye" in its eye drop form marketed as Timoptol.

In some cases patients have been given all the above treatment and still the tension in the eyes is not controlled. Besides being ineffective, there are serious side effects from the use of all these drugs.

Pilocarpine

The normal mechanism of the pupil,which changes in light, is destroyed by a miotic such as pilocarpine. This kind of drug also substantially reduces the visual level which is impaired to begin with, simply because the size of the pupil is artificially reduced, and so, consequently, is the level of light entering the eye. It is well established that seeing is directly related to the intensity of illumination of the object viewed. In some cases using a miotic in eyedrop form can reduce the visual level by 50 per cent.