Millions of people suffer from poor eyesight. The most common of complaints of eye defect tend to be myopia (nearsightedness), hypermetropia (farsightedness or hyperopia) and presbyopia (old age sight).

If you visit your Ophalmologist with one of these complaints, you are likely to be prescribed one of the following treatments: Glasses, contacts lenses, or corrective surgery (if you have the money). However there is an alternative way to improve eyesight naturally, although the world of medicine has turned its back on it. This method includes simple exercises that are to be carried out daily, which eventually correct vision problems like the ones mentioned above. In this article we will be discussing how to improve eyesight naturally.

Before we look at how you can improve your eyesight naturally, lets just review some of the conventional treatments and how effective they are at improving eyesight. We'll start with glasses.

Prescription Glasses temporarily correct vision by helping the eye focus light rays correctly. They do this by focusing the light rays on the retina (the area at the back of the eyeball), this ensures a clear image is formed, if light rays do not focus on the retina the result is a blurred image. The type of glasses you will be prescribed depends on your eye problem.

Glasses are very effective at treating the symptoms of eye problems (i.e. blurred vision), however they do not treat the cause, and as a result your vision will not improve, and you will need to buy stronger glasses every couple of years. Not everyone likes to wear glass, some prefer to wear contact lenses which brings us to another popular method for poor vision treatment.

Contact lenses - Contact lenses are thin see-through discs that sit on the cornea. They work in the same way glasses do, but they have the advantage of being so small that they fit on the cornea. There is a special type of contact lens called a Corneal Reshaping Lens, it is special because rather than just dealing with the symptoms of poor vision like glasses and other contact lenses, it actually works on the cause. Corneal Reshaping lenses as the name suggests actually reshape the cornea, so you can see without contact lenses, however this is only temporary.

A brief history of the the method to improve vision naturally is outlined below:

The Bates Method - Many people claim to have improved there visin significantly using this natural method. It was developed by Dr William Bates (1860-1931), he was a practitioner of eyesight improvement. He was a graduate of Cornell University and of the College of Physicians and Surgeons in New York.

Through constant experimentation on his patients, Bates developed the Bates method which addresses the cause of bad eyesight and how to overcome it without glasses. He developed some simple exercises and principles in the 1920's. All though his methods were largely ignored by the world of medicine the Bates method is still practiced to this day throughout the world. If you are trying to improve eyesight naturally it would be a good idea to look into this method.