>>20380That's still a sales tactic, similar to F2P/P2P online games. I'm not saying that their methods don't work, but their methods are not the only ones that work either.
In this preface of
The Art of Seeing Huxley says he was damn near blind and the Bates method had him seeing better than ever within a couple months.
"AT sixteen, I had a violent attack of keratitis punctata, which left me (after
eighteen months of near-blindness, during which I had to depend on Braille for
my reading and a guide for my walking) with one eye just capable of light
perception, and the other with enough vision to permit of my detecting the
two-hundred-foot letter on the Snellen Chart at ten feet. My inability to see was
mainly due to the presence of opacities in the cornea; but this condition was
complicated by hyperopia and astigmatism. For the first few years, my doctors
advised me to do my reading with the aid of a powerful hand magnifying glass. But
later on I was promoted to spectacles. With the aid of these I was able to recognize
the seventy-foot line at ten feet and to read tolerably well—provided always that I
kept my better pupil dilated with atropine, so that I might see round a particularly
heavy patch of opacity at the centre of the cornea. True, a measure of strain and
fatigue was always present, and there were occasions when I was overcome by that
sense of complete physical and mental exhaustion which only eye-strain can
produce. Still, I was grateful to be able to see as well as I could.
Things went on in this way until the year 1939, when, in spite of greatly
strengthened glasses, I found the task of reading increasingly difficult and fatiguing.
There could be no doubt of it: my capacity to see was steadily and quite rapidly
failing. But just as I was wondering apprehensively what on earth I should do, if
reading were to become impossible, I happened to hear of a method of visual
re-education and of a teacher who was said to make use of this method with
conspicuous success. Education sounded harmless enough and, since optical glass
was no longer doing me any good, I decided to take the plunge. Within a couple of
months I was reading without spectacles and, what was better still, without strain
and fatigue. The chronic tensions, and the occasional spells of complete exhaustion,
were things of the past. Moreover, there were definite signs that the opacity in the
cornea, which had remained unchanged for upwards of twenty-five years, was
beginning to clear up. At the present time, my vision, though very far from normal,
is about twice as good as it used to be when I wore spectacles, and before I had
learnt the art of seeing; and the opacity has cleared sufficiently to permit the worse
eye, which for years could do no more than distinguish light from darkness, to
recognize the ten-foot line on the chart at one foot.