What Causes Astigmatism?

Astigmatism is a refractive error due to the uneven curvature of the cornea and/or the lens of your eye. Your mind can compensate for a certain amount of distortion, but beyond a certain point, some images would appear double, merge together, slanted, or out of proportion. The letter “I” may appear double, the “F” may appear like a “P”, or the “C” may appear like an “O”, et cetera.

My astigmatism was particularly high during the years when I experimented with natural means of improving my vision before I stumbled onto ortho C. Refer to my web site www.theeyefix.com for more information on orthoculogy (or ortho C, for short).

The problem with most natural methods of visual improvement is that the rate of improvement is very slow and tedious because the oblique muscles can only relax by so much. That means your “effort to see” can still be considerably higher. There are cases where it can be so severe that it induces a relapse; and you would lose a large portion of your improvement in vision.

That led me to believe that the amount of astigmatism, which usually goes hand in hand with myopia, is in proportion to the degree of “strain” produced by an excessive “effort to see”. The distortion of your cornea is mainly due to the uneven pull of the rectus muscles—as they try to prevent the eyeball from becoming elongated. One pair of rectus muscles tends to pull harder on the cornea than the other. (There are two pairs of rectus muscles that runs transversely across the eye at right angles to each other.) When the eyeball refuse to “shift” to reduce its elongated shape, it causes the cornea to become distorted. This particular type of astigmatism is called corneal astigmatism.

When you continue to make an excessive effort to bring a distant image into focus, the ciliary muscle will also be affected. There is excessive “strain” because you are not only attempting to “flatten” out the lens but also to distort them to compensate for the unevenness of the cornea—since the image that is projected is not only blur but also distorted.

But the harder you try to bring a distant image into focus this way, the more the ciliary muscle will tighten up instead of becoming relaxed. The excessive effort can distort the lens (as well as causing it to “bulge”) when the pull of the ciliary muscle becomes misaligned. This can produce a particular type of astigmatism called lenticular astigmatism.

But lenticular astigmatism usually compounds your corneal astigmatism to make your overall astigmatism worse. When the ciliary muscle distorts the lens, it does not offset the distortion of the cornea. That is, when you mesh the two distortions together, the resultant curvature will become more irregular.

The extra “effort to see” will also cause the oblique muscles to tighten up against the equator of the eyeball. This tends to squeeze it into a more elongated shape. This will increase the resistance against any attempt to correct it by “flatten” it out, and this will only increase your “effort to see”. It is a vicious circle. Thus the excessive effort you make to correct your nearsightedness by natural means without resorting to ortho C tends to make your nearsightedness worse.

This is why astigmatism goes hand in hand with nearsightedness and why an increase in your myopia will produce an increase in your astigmatism. The general notion is that astigmatism cannot be cured. It can only be corrected by wearing a pair of astigmatic lenses—or a pair of astigmatic minus lenses if you are also nearsighted. Another way it can be corrected is by laser treatment—by shaving off the uneven portion of your cornea. But this is not actually a cure. It does not address the underlying problem as to why the cornea and the lens of your eye became distorted in the first place. Thus there is no guarantee that your astigmatism will not reoccur.

Reducing Your Astigmatism

Your reduction in astigmatism by ortho C is best exemplified when you apply ortho C to “reduce” severe myopia. The theory behind how it is possible to reduce severe myopia is outlined in my book Reversing Nearsightedness.

Besides stimulating your lens and eyeball to “flatten” out, ortho C also tends to realign the ciliary muscle and rectus muscles. When this happens, you are actually reducing (or even eliminating) your astigmatism. Thus you are further reducing your nearsightedness.

The curvature of the cornea does not necessarily have to change when ortho C “smooths” it out. It may change slightly, depending on the severity of your astigmatism, but it would be for the better. Corneal astigmatism is actually the difference between the horizontal and vertical curvature of your cornea. When ortho C reduces this discrepancy, the horizontal and vertical curvature would gravitate towards the average of those two curvatures. In most cases, you would find that the resultant average curvature would not be that much different from the average curvature of your cornea before you started ortho C.

The effect the “multiplier effect” has on the rectus muscles is that one pair of muscles does not have to pull more on the cornea compared to another pair because the ortho C lens “draws” on the eyeball to reduce its elongated length. So Ortho C indirectly realigns the tension of the rectus muscles evenly. One pair does not have to pull more than the other because the “draw” of the ortho C lens reduces the force that is necessary to establish this new shape. Also, less effort is required to hold it in that shape. The reduction in the tension and the evenness of this reduced tension tends to corrects the distortion of the cornea.

The realignment of your lens takes place after ortho C realigns the cornea. The realignment of the cornea takes place first because the mechanical “draw” has a direct affect on the eyeball—and thus the rectus muscles. Once the rectus muscles are realigned, then ortho C will stimulate the ciliary muscle indirectly. So realigning the rectus muscles is the first step in reducing your overall astigmatism.

When ortho C removes the spasm in your rectus muscles, it also relieves the spasm of the ciliary muscle as well when less “effort to see” is required. That means the ciliary muscle does not have to distort the lens before it can bring about proper focus. The ciliary muscle then pulls evenly all around the lens. When the forces around the lens becomes uniform, the lens itself tends to become realigned. This reduces your lenticular astigmatism.

And this in turn stimulates the rectus muscles to further become more even because the reduction in tension of the ciliary muscles also tends to reduce the tension of the oblique muscles. (Refer to my book Reversing Nearsightedness to the relationship between the tension of the ciliary muscles and the oblique muscles.)

The pull of the rectus muscles then not only becomes less as a result, but the pull becomes more even because you are still wearing the ortho C lens. Thus your astigmatism is reduced progressively as you continue to perform the ortho C drills to reduce your nearsightedness.

An Experiment to Prove that Ortho C Smooths Out the Cornea

If your “effort to see” all of a sudden becomes excessive, it can worsen your existing astigmatism in a very short time. One pair of rectus muscles would be more tense than the other, so their overall pull would not be uniform.

I confirmed this by intentionally subjecting myself to an excessive amount of “strain” by performing a certain exercise that places a lot of emphasis on central focusing. This particular exercise was based on a method called “central fixation” which was touted by practitioners of the Bates method. For more information on the Bates method, refer to Dr. W. H. Bates’ book Seeing Without Glasses. It was first published in 1919.

The problem with this drill, as with any intense drill that involves “central fixation”, is that when it is performed for an extended period of time, it can produce a lot of “strain”. To make things harder on myself (in order to induce more “strain”), I decided to increase my “effort to see” by performing this drill in the dark so that my peripheral vision would be excluded. I had illuminated numbers that stood out in the dark, and I tried to read it at a certain distance where the image became just slightly blur. (For more information on how your peripheral vision can reduce your “effort to see”, refer to my book Reversing Nearsightedness.

A great deal of effort was necessary to produce a focal point “draw”. I was not wearing my ortho C lenses. Thus there was no mechanical “draw” to reduce the tension of the ciliary muscle. And that means the oblique muscles will also be tense. And that in turn, means the rectus muscles are up against a higher resistance in their attempt to reduce the elongated shape of the myopic eyeball. (For an explanation on how the tension of the ciliary muscle is transmitted to the oblique muscles, refer to my book Reversing Nearsightedness.

After engaging in this continuous “draw” drill for about five to ten minutes a day for three days, my astigmatism increased dramatically. It was over -2.0 diopters for both eyes. It did not subside for days. Afterwards, I decided to apply ortho C again. I managed to reduce my astigmatism again by wearing the ortho C lenses for two days, for ten to fifteen minutes each day, while performing the intermittent “draw” drills. My astigmatism improved to the way it was before I conducted this experiment.

This experiment indicates that ortho C indirectly removes the spasm incurred by the ciliary muscle and rectus muscles (and directly removes the spasm of the oblique muscles).

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