Miotics also create artificial night blindness. Prolonged use produces paralysis of the sphincter muscle, so that even when you stop using the drug the pupil remains abnormally small. The effect of this is to permanently impair the visual level and create permanent night blindness, even after glaucoma may be cured.

Pilocarpine can also frequently cause cataract, as has been noticed in various journals.

Diamox (acetazolamide)

This particular drug frequently causes drowsiness, numbness and tingling of the face and extremities. Less frequent side effects include fatigue, excitement, thirst, headache, dizziness, lack of muscle coordination, increase in breathing rate, tinnitus (noises in the ears), hearing loss and gastrointestinal disturbances. Fever and skin reactions have been reported, as have a few fatalities. The American Journal of Optometry also reported that such therapy can also cause myopia, lens displacement and very low intra ocular tension with risk of retinal detachment, oedema of the retina and changes in the refractive ability of the eye.

Timoptol

This eye drop form of timolol maleate, which is still in its experimental stages, can effect the central nervous system. Even if you use it in one eye it not only affects both eyes but also other secretions in the body. Its serious side effects include heart failure and other heart disorders, fatigue, dizziness, vomiting, nausea, depression, hallucinations, insomnia and gastrointestinal disorders.

Besides these individual side effects, any of the orthodox treatments for glaucoma, which are directed towards treating the symptoms of raised tension, can make the intra ocular tension too low below the safe level and cause a detached retina. This can easily happen when patients are sent away for several months without being regularly monitored, and especially in cases of high tension when all these drugs are sometimes given together.

The Dangers of Surgery for Squinting or Strabismus

The last 50 years has shown that most cases of strabismus, or squint (when eyes are not properly aligned) can be cured with nutritional therapy. However, many cases of squinting are still treated surgically, and in every such case serious damage is done to the binocular function.

Thirty years ago, by combining nutritional therapy with orthoptic therapy, I witnessed many cases of strabismus cured within a few weeks. This compared to the years it took to cure the condition through traditional methods, such as wearing a patch over the normal eye. The success rate of these traditional methods is very low, which is why the majority of cases are referred for surgery.

When one eye deviates from its normal position, the usual surgical method of straightening the eye is to cut one or more of the extra ocular muscles which are responsible for moving the eye in the direction of the deviation, and suturing it further back on the surface of the eyeball so as to weaken its pull. Alternatively, the muscle or muscles responsible for moving the eye in the opposite direction may be cut and sutured further forward on the surface of the eyeball so as to increase the pull and thus overcome the deviation. Frequently, both these procedures are combined, and it is very common for the good eye as well as the deviating eye to be operated on.

The surgery thus destroys the normal function of all the horizontally acting muscles. Not only is the delicate relationship between the photoreceptors in the retinae and the individual muscle fibres of all these four recti muscles disrupted, but the motility of all four muscles is seriously impaired. The normal eye movements are restricted in both horizontal directions.