Show HN: Refractify – Optical software against myopia

This is very cool and exciting. It seems like a good method to reduce the development of myopia.

However, my understanding is that myopia is also simply age related. Discussions I've had recently were looking at the hardening of the lens as a factor.

I've been trying to re-train my eye with an eye chart, and I've been surprised how after just a few weeks, my vision has gotten much clearer. Going from 20/40 to nearly 20/25.

In the past few weeks I've started taking collagen to increase/maintain flexibility in the eye, and will continue with the eye exercises.

This is in no way to say that refractify is not valuable. I think it is and I'd add it to my routine.

I should also state that I have corrected my eyesight once before. When I first became a software engineer, I noticed my eyesight degrade quickly (I was in my 30s). I made a conscious effort to spend time outside looking long-distance such as reading street signs from as far away as I could. My eyesight improved dramatically. However, as I've aged, I went from 20/15 to 20/40. Note: 20/15 was examined by a doctor, 20/40 is self measured with an eye chart.

You might be interested in endmyopia.org

Its about controlled axial length changes to the eyeball with differing methods.

Thank you, 1. As long as the myopia is progressing there is an opportunity to slow that and avoid complications of high myopia. While screen altering may in principle go beyond the effectiveness of optical devices for myopia control as we can provide arbitrary input to the retinal neural network, realistically myopia reversal for adult humans is not considered achieveable. Intervention should ideally be started as soon as possible. In fact there is the possibility of delaying the onset of myopia or fully preventing it for some future generations, but obviously we are a long way off from there in terms of clinical studies.

2. I think undercorrection is somewhat related. I have not yet read the study you linked, I usually refer to this review for undercorrection. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9213207/ I think it would be possible to achieve some results that way as some of the studies from the review suggest, but in practice it is difficult to precisely control the amount of myopic defocus on the retina that you get that way. Most of the time you get no myopic defocus at all due to accomodation and with strong undercorrection you risk losing the visual cues to the sign of defocus, which results in deprivation myopia. I think this is the reason that MiSight contact lenses are known to be effective, while naive undercorrection has mixed results at best.

here's the effect at 100% strength: https://imgur.com/a/PfrIsex

and a more reasonable 35%: https://imgur.com/a/doT8YKd

A deeper look into this shows that the owner of the site (Jake Steiner) is very controlling, and hides advice and information behind paywalls. I recommend reducedlens.org over endmyopia.org for this reason.