dave's blog

 This is something else I want to share from my inbox. A friend, who I will keep anonymous, send me this comment in an email today:

"I was mentioning self-tonometry to one of my parents. I said that, at the very best, we can hold off (or even reverse) loss for ever. And at worst, we can delay the trajectory of the disease by a decade or more. Would you agree?"

Here is my reply:

One of the FitEyes.com members asked a question about the changes in intraocular pressure after sex in a comment to an earlier post on my blog about the potential relationship between masturbation and eye pressure. I'm going to give you an estimate of the intraocular pressure changes after sexual activity off the top of my head.

Someone recently asked me where I keep my tonometer. When I started self-tonometry, I kept my tonometer in my office in a convenient location so that I could check my intraocular pressure while working without getting up from my desk. I could check my IOP while talking on the phone or using the computer, for example. At that time stress was one of my main research focuses and work was my main source of stress. Eventually, I achieved excellent management of my intraocular pressure during the work day and I began looking at my diurnal IOP curve more closely.

In 2006 I wrote about the news that Ocufors, a plant-based pharmaceutical product for glaucoma, had received regulatory approval from India's equivalent of the US FDA (the Drugs Controller General of India - DCGI).

Ocufors is a natural, plant-derived product that has been found to be 30% more effective at reducing intraocular pressure than existing glaucoma drugs, according to its manufacturer.

Makandi (Coleus forskholii) is one of the most broadly useful herbs of Ayurveda, but until recently it was not well-known in the West. So wide-ranging are its therapeutic applications that it has been called a pharmacopaea in a single plant.

If you allow yourself to see things through the eyes of another, you will be rewarded by better sight.

Just in case that statement sounds a little too quixotic, let me frame this in terms of intraocular pressure and glaucoma and tell you what myself and others are finding by carefully measuring our eye pressure with professional quality tonometers.

Dr. Michael Ashworth says, "The myths that masturbation leads to blindness, or causes you to grow hair on the palms of your hands, or will cause someone to be impotent later in life, or leads to mental illness, have all been debunked many times; but they seem to have a life of their own and crop up again and again."

This information comes from Katie Davis, author of Awake Joy: The Essence of Enlightenment. I haven't read her book, but I was impressed by her list of recommended reading. I wanted to share her list.