We believe that exposure to moderate sun or just being outdoor ( avoiding the peak hours ) for a period of about 15 hours or more weekly could be very beneficial in the cases of macular degeneration, myopia, etc.

The more you receive (potential) nocive (possibly cancigenerous) light ( as from fluorescent lamps ) or other nocive stimulus the more you should try to receive the ideal exposure to sun and or receive natural sunlight in your eyes (because of the healing capacities of the sun for eyes, skin and health in general ).

When it does not cause danger take you prescription glasses off while outdoors ( sun swing ) or expose your closed eyes ( without glasses or contact lenses ) to the sun.

When you read, try to read close to a window or even better outdoors ( under a veranda or umbrella in the case of very intense sun ).

Even while watching a TV or computer screen try to receive some natural light in the room ( that does not cause glare on your screen ).

In the case you cannot spend the ideal amount of time outdoors, consider more intense ( and possibly controversial ) excercises that are about looking repeatadly past a source of light like a lamp ( sun swing, waving your head before a light source ) ( most advice to do this with your eyes closed ).
Make sure you take the precautions especially the time to adapt ( in case of stronger sources or with eyes open ).

Eye Exercises For Myopia ( Nearsightedness )

Scientific evidence proves that eye exercises can bring improvement in myopia.
Do not strain your eyes when performing these exercises, and do consult your ophthalmologist.

Palming
This technique helps the eyes to relax. Rub your palms together rapidly, so that they get warm. Close the eyes. Place the palms over your eyes. Do not press. Feel the warmth and let the eyes relax. Cup the eyes for a minute or two. Repeat twice daily.

Focal flexibility exercise
The focal flexibility exercise is an important and noteworthy exercise for myopia.
Hold your finger 15 cm or 6 inches in front of your eyes.
Focus your vision on the finger for 10 seconds. Then, look at an object at a distance. Now, alternate your focus from the finger to the distant object, about 40 repetitions. Do not wear contact lenses or glasses while doing the exercise.

Sunning
For this exercise, you will require a light source; a lamp with a 60 or 100 watt bulb is best.
You must keep your eyes closed all through the exercise.
Turn directly to the light source. If you feel discomfort, move away from the light source. Picture a point on the horizon. Move the eyes and the head together, and turn slowly to the right, taking 3 – 4 seconds.
Come back to the center. Next, turn to the left. Return to the center.
Follow up the sunning exercise with palming.
Also, closing your eyes and exposing them to the gentle early morning sun is recommended.

For this exercise never use an infrared or ultraviolet lamp.
Avoid using fluorescent lamp ( "cool lighting" ) and CFLs ( compact fluorescnet lamp ).
Use the old fashioned bulb or a bulb or lamp that simulates as much as possible the natural sun light
( full spectrum light ).

Sunlight and Short-Sightedness

How sunlight may save children's sight
http://www.radioaustralia.net.au/innovations/stories/s2135949.htm

Contact: Dr Ian Morgan, Head Retina and Myopia Research Unit, ARC Centre of Excellence in Vision, Australian National University, GPO Box 475, Canberra, ACT 2601 International Telephone: +61 2 6125 4671 FAX: +61 2 6125 3808 Email: ian.morgan@anu.edu.au Website: http://www.vision.edu.au www.rsbs.anu.edu.au/Profiles/Ian_Morgan/

TRANSCRIPT:
DESLEY BLANCH : Exposure to sunlight could be a critical factor in stopping children from becoming short-sighted.
These findings appear to overturn the long-held view that education and close work are the key drivers of myopia.

Australian scientists, including Dr Ian Morgan of the Australian Research Council's Centre of Excellence in Vision Science, presented their research recently to the Australasian Ophthalmic and Visual Sciences meeting in Canberra.

I wondered how their information was received by those at the Canberra meeting, whether there was surprise or relief that there may be a reasonably simple solution.

DR IAN MORGAN : I think really a matter of relief, because we've presented these findings not only in the meeting in Canberra but also in places like Hong Kong and Singapore where myopia is a real problem.

And I think what's happening is that people are relieved that there might be a very simple intervention which can help to put the epidemic of myopia under control.

DESLEY BLANCH : Let's talk about what the condition myopia is. What happens in the eye?

DR IAN MORGAN : Well what happens in the eye is effectively the eye grows too long.
To get normal vision, there's a balance between if you like the optical power of the front of the eye and the length of the eye.
It's just like a camera in that sense.
If the eye grows too long, then the images are out of focus and they can't be corrected by changing the power of the lens within the eye and hence you need glasses or contact lenses.

DESLEY BLANCH : Now you say there's been a dramatic escalation in myopia rates in East Asia during the past 30 years. How dramatic is that?

DR IAN MORGAN : Well really quite dramatic.
It was in fact this that first attracted my interest, because I really didn't know what myopia was a few years ago.

The best set of data are from Taiwan on the one hand, from Singapore on the other.
Singapore's got a very large set of data based on male conscripts into the army.
And what those data show is that 40 years ago, say two generations ago, 25 per cent of kids roughly who are leaving school were short-sighted.
These days it's close to 90 per cent.

DESLEY BLANCH : As a comparison, during the same period of years, how much have the rates of myopia in Australia changed?

DR IAN MORGAN : Well, we don't have good data on that, that's one of the sorts of things we're trying to find.
The prevalence of myopia as it's called is very much lower in Australia than it is in Singapore.
In fact it's one of the lowest in the world. But there are the same signs of much more gradual increase in the rate over time.

DESLEY BLANCH : It's been suggested that there may be an East Asian genetic susceptibility connected with intensive education and urbanisation.
But your research debunks that -- in what way?

DR IAN MORGAN : Well, yes that's been the common argument in the literature.
'Well, the reason we're finding this in Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Guangzhou for example, is that there is some East Asian susceptibility'.

There are two things that debunk this.
The first is that if you look at the people of Indian origin in Singapore, they are nearly as myopic as the Chinese.
And yet back in India, the rate of myopia is quite low.

The second thing is that we have been able to compare the prevalence of myopia in Chinese kids in Singapore, as compared to kids of Chinese origin growing up in Sydney. And at the age of six, the kids in Singapore -- the Chinese kids in Singapore are ten times more myopic than the kids of Chinese origin in Australia.

DESLEY BLANCH : But did the Singaporean children spend more time in near-work activity than the Sydney children?

DR IAN MORGAN : If anything, they spent a little bit less and this is what led in part to us looking for what other factors could be important. And the striking difference that came across was that these kids -- remember they're matched for age and they're matched for ethnicity, they're all of Chinese origin.
The kids of Chinese origin in Sydney were spending a lot more time outdoors than the kids of Chinese origin in Singapore.

DESLEY BLANCH : How do you describe 'a lot more'? Have you got that in numbers?

DR IAN MORGAN : Yes, I can give that to you in numbers. The children in Singapore were spending about three hours a week outside, so very, very limited periods of time outside, excluding the school hours. Basically they went to school, they went home, they did their homework and then they watched television and that was life.

The children of Chinese origin in Sydney were spending more like 13 to 14 hours a week, so four fold increase.
That's not as much as kids of European origin spend in Sydney, but a very marked change over what would have been the habits of Chinese children growing up in Hong Kong and Singapore.

DESLEY BLANCH : Why don't these children in Asia spend more time outdoors? Is it a cultural reason which says they don't wish to be darkened by sun tan or something of that nature, or just what?

DR IAN MORGAN : Well, I think part of it's climatic.
Singaporeans I think would argue that it's hot and sticky and the most sensible thing to do is to stay inside and use the air-conditioner.

In Hong Kong, a different set of issues. There's not a lot of places to go outside.
There's a standing joke in Hong Kong that if everybody in Hong Kong were told to go outside, they couldn't. There wouldn't be enough space.

So these are issues that complicate the interpretation but there does seem to be a cultural characteristic of Chinese peoples that they're not as much outdoors-oriented as Australians are for example.

DESLEY BLANCH : What time period in the sun do you believe would make an effective difference in preventing or reducing myopia?

DR IAN MORGAN : At this stage, it's very hard to say.
You've got some rough figures there. Spending 13 hours a week, so roughly two hours a day seems to make a big difference for the kids growing up in Singapore as compared to Sydney. That gives you some feel for it.

We think that if you're doing about three hours a day outside, then you're probably reasonably protected, but we haven't yet been able to factor in a whole set of factors in like light intensity, hours of clear sunlight versus cloudy days. We have no hold on that at the moment, but we're working to get a better understanding.

DESLEY BLANCH : And whether these kids are dressed in hats and cover-up clothing and 30+ lotions and all of that.
I mean how does the sun's rays do its job to get through all of that?

DR IAN MORGAN : You raise a very interesting issue. But first of all, everything tells us that this is light actually entering the eye, which controls the eyes' growth.
So sun hats, sunglasses, sun lotions are not part of the picture.
But it does point to the fact that particularly in a country like Australia, there is a really delicate balance that we need to strike.

If exposure to sunlight is important for getting the eye to grow properly, to prevent myopia, then we need to balance that against the possibility of Australia remaining the Melanoma Capital of the World (( MHIP : Australia is affected by the Southern Ozone Hole )).

DESLEY BLANCH : Exactly. So why does sunlight cut myopia rates, the science?

DR IAN MORGAN : Well, there are at least three hypotheses there. The first one which has been a long-standing one is that if you go outside and you look off into the distance, then your eye muscles, your accommodation will relax and this will slow down your eye growth and hence you won't become myopic.

There are various reasons why this is not particularly convincing, particularly because we're much less convinced these days about the importance of the reverse of long distance viewing, namely what we call near work, reading, writing etc.

So, two other possibilities. One is that when you go outside, your pupil constricts. It gets narrower and if you think of that in terms of what a photographer's doing with a camera, it increases the depth of field, de-focus is much less important in bright light. ( MHIP : this is not convincing because the eye tests and the card reading is done inside and under normal darker conditions and the pupil will expand and the myopia will be measurable )

But we think the real reason may be that light intensity, and we know this from studies on experimental animals, that light intensity controls the release of a transmitter called dopamine, from the retina.
And dopamine is known at least in certain circumstances to be able to inhibit eye growth.
Now that's not proven, but there's a very plausible case for a pathway from light exposure to control of eye growth and, once again we're working experimentally to confirm that that's the pathway involved.

DESLEY BLANCH : There are serious risks ahead for children who suffer from myopia, so what are they exactly?

DR IAN MORGAN : Well, this is the aspect of myopia that's perhaps least well understood.
When you get to high myopia, which is technically more than about six diopters, which means if you like, that the world is blurred beyond about 16 centimetres, then you are at much greater risk of a number of later visual problems.

Retina detachments become more common, tears in the retina, retinal pathologies, some of which can be sight-threatening, all become much more common and if you like, they become much more common at an increasing rate.

So, six diopters is about the transition point. You go to ten, there's a marked increase. You go to 14, and there's an even more marked increase. So keeping the myopia as low as possible is also part of the challenge.

DESLEY BLANCH : It's said that Singapore faces this serious public health threat of having as much as 10 per cent of its population developing a serious retinal problem later in life.
Would other nations have similar figures for their populations for the same reasons?

DR IAN MORGAN : Well, these parts of urban East Asia, where this same epidemic has occurred, yes. What the Singapore data tell us and the situation is very similar in Hong Kong, in Guangzhou and in Taiwan is that around about 20 per cent of kids leaving school are already in that high myopia category.

As a rough rule of thumb, 50 per cent of them will have serious eye complications later, some of which can be fixed, some of which can't.
And so they are at are very much increased risk of blindness and it does massively change the picture if in a country like Singapore, 20 per cent of the population is if you like, a 50 per cent risk of going blind later on.

DESLEY BLANCH : So Ian finally, what stage are you at in your research? I mean are your findings concrete enough to inform public health policymakers?

DR IAN MORGAN : Oh there've certainly already been picked up in Singapore. Singapore have changed their myopia prevention strategy from something where they knew there was very little evidence to support it, to encourage outdoor activity.

There are certainly some cultural problems to overcome. There are also some practical problems to overcome. It is hot and sticky in Singapore and a lot of children prefer to stay inside for much of the time. But by working on how you structure the school day, increasing the amount of time outside during the school day, and encouraging outdoor activities as much as possible in the spaces that are certainly available in Singapore. Then they could make a quite significant dent in the prevalence of myopia but we'll have to wait and see.

DESLEY BLANCH : Dr Ian Morgan who heads the Retina and Myopia Research Unit in the ARC Centre of Excellence in Vision at the Australian National University in Canberra and who has been describing how sunlight may save children's sight.